Salem's Lot by Stephen King
His flashlight beam struck the box, and he would have screamed if he had had the strength. That was what was making that queer wooden thumping noise. It was rocking back and forth, and the wood seemed to be straining, bulging. As his eyes took it in, one of the aluminum bands split and flew upward, making a shadow on the wall like a clutching hand...
He ran.
In Danny Glick and Others, at the end of the chapter when the nurse finds Danny dead, there is another section with the doctor reporting on him, and the vampiric condition of Danny is revealed much earlier.
"Dead," he said, and began to pull the sheet up over the oddly calm face.
Her hand stopped him. "Doctor?"
"Yes?" He blinked at her mildly. He was a thin, intense-looking resident named Burke, and he was losing his hair rapidly.
"Those scratches on his neck are gone."
He looked. "Yes," he said indifferently, and covered the face of Danny Glick with the sheet. "Healed, probably."
"I thought he was alive," she said, and gripped her elbows to restrain a very un-R.N.-like shiver. "I thought he got up and opened the window and fainted. He looks like a...a waxwork."
"Really?" he said without interest, and turned away. "It's a condition that sometimes predates rigor mortis. Known in the argot as mortician's complexion."
"God," she muttered.
They went out.
Under the sheet, Danny Glick opened flat obsidian eyes and smiled. The teeth discovered by that smile were white and cruelly sharp.
After Ben and Susan make love in the park in Ben (II), they have a different discussion, a longer one, about the nature of the Marsten House and evil.
"The book?" she asked. "You were going to tell me about that before we were so sweetly interrupted."
"The book is about what happened to me at the Marsten House," he said slowly. "I can see it from my window. And the paperweight I use to hold down my manuscript is the snow-dome I had in my hand when I ran out of there."
"Ben, that sounds morbid. Morbid as hell." Her face was sober, and the flat glow of the streetlights milked her tan, making her look pallid.
"It is," he said. "But didn't I tell you writing was an act of exorcism? I'm writing this one out of my nightmares, and I wouldn't mind if I milked that reservoir dry. You know, the other three books were all quite cheerful...Conway's Daughter especially. They all had happy endings. Do you know what Brewster at the The New York Times said about the conclusion of Air Dance? 'Ben Mears reminds one of a mentally regressive street-performer doing a tap-dance on the gallows of the American prison system.'"
"I thought it was lovely," she said indignantly. "Just because you're not willing to go around and cry doom like Camus or Salinger or John Updike--"
"Do you remember when those hoods shot John Stennis in Washington, D.C.?" he asked.
"Sure," she said, puzzled by the abrupt change in direction.
"They held him up outside his house and after he handed over his wallet and watch, one of them said, 'We're going to shoot you anyway.' Then they did it. That's always haunted me. Or Capote's book, In Cold Blood. I was nineteen when I read it, and the image of Perry Smith going around and blowing the Clutters' heads off is as clear now as it was then. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be lying on the floor with your hands tied behind you and to see a man coming toward you with a shotgun, and knowing what he was going to do?"
"Ben, you're giving me the creeps."
"I'm sorry," he said. "This is hardly the place, is it?" He gestured at the dark around them.
"Go ahead," she said. "It's very important to me."
"Why?"
"Because it is to you."
He looked over to the right, and there was the Marsten House. The shutters had been pulled back--they were closed all day, every day--and the light shone out of the downstairs windows in rectangles.
"Those are kerosene lamps, aren't they?" he asked.
"Yes...I think so."
"Do you ever wonder who is up there?" he asked.
"Everyone in town wonders."
He laughed. "I suppose they do. I wonder if Mabel Werts has got the straight dope yet?"
She chuckled throatily. "If she did, my mother would have it, too. You can bet Mabel's bending every effort, though."
"The book is set in a town like Momson," he said, "and the people are like Momson people. There is a series of sex murders and mutilations. I'm going to describe one of the crimes in progress, from beginning to end, in minute detail. I'm going to rub the reader's nose in it. I was outlining that part when Ralphie Glick disappeared. That's why...well, it gave me a nasty turn."
"I can understand that. Ben, is it necessary to be so...so clinical about violence?"
"I don't know," he said honestly. "It does to me, in this book."
"Suppose you encourage somebody to commit a similar crime?"
"Do you mean like the kid who saw Psycho and then ran out and killed his grandmother?"
"Yes, something like that."
"I'd like to think he would have killed her anyway," he said. "That's brutal, I suppose. What I mean is I wish she hadn't been killed at all, but since she was, I hope Hitchcock isn't an accessory after the fact. You know, people used to argue that drugstore pornography, stuff like Beach Blanket Gang-Bang, encouraged sex crimes. Then the government did a study and said that was full of shit. Most sex criminals are Eagle scout types with severe repression problems--like the old inquisitors who used to stretch teenage blondes on the rack and run their hands all over their bodies, searching for witch's tits and marks of the devil--then reaming out their vaginas with red-hot pokers. The kid who masturbates in the bathroom over a skin magazine doesn't want to run out and rape a six-year-old and then cut her up. A shy, retiring bank clerk who has no sex outlets at all and who broods in his room night after night may."
"In other words, if a man is going to do it, he'll do it regardless."
"I distrust generalizations like that," he said. "If The Night Creature is published and six months later a series of crimes with the same M.O. crops up, I'd lose a lot of sleep. A writer who won't take moral responsibility may be a good writer, but he's a shitty human being in my book. And I think there are some writers who have made mistakes in judgment. In Airport, Arthur Hailey tells you how to make a suitcase bomb. There's a lovely description of how to hot-wire a car in Texas Whirlwind, by Norman Sullivan. There are others, too."
They had arrived at her house, and stood by the mailbox. The lights downstairs were on, shining out on the lawn, and looking in the front bay window, Ben could see Ann Norton rocking and knitting something.
"What's the rest of it?" she asked.
"Well, the house. The guy who lives there is a recluse, has been for years. People start to suspect he's the killer. They go up there and find out he's hung himself in the upstairs bedroom. A note is found. I'm sorry, the note says. God forgive me for what I've done.
"The killings stop...for a while. Then they begin again. The town sheriff begins to think, you know, that the real murderer killed the old man and wrote the note to throw the scent. He gets a court order and the body is exhumed. But it's gone."
"It's awful, all right," she said.
"People begin to suspect something supernatural...even the sheriff can't get the idea out of his mind. The book's hero is a kid named Jamie Atwood. He goes up to the house because he wants to join the big kid's club--"
"The hero is Ben Mears," she said.
He bowed. "Every author makes a guest appearance in every book, Susan. There, that's three generalizations about writers, and I told you that first day I'd only make one. That's breach of promise."
"Never mind that. What happens?"
"The old man is up there, awful and rotted, a real horror. Rope still dangling from his neck. It turns out in the end that the real murderer--the town librarian--killed the old man just as the sheriff thought, and then went one step further. Dug up the body, cut off the head, and--"
"Yes," she sai
d. "Ben, you're like a stranger to me. Do you know that? I'm scared of you."
"We'd all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other's minds," he said. "Do you know what made Poe great? And Machen and Lovecraft? A direct pipeline to the old subconscious. To the fears and twisted needs that swim around down there like phosphorescent fish. That's what I'm after. And I'm getting it."
"Does Jamie live?" she asked.
"No," he said softly. "He's the mad librarian's last victim."
"Well I think that's awful," she said, sounding upset. "Where's the redeeming social merit in all that?"
"I don't know," he said. "Where's the redeeming social merit in Psycho?"
"We're not talking about Psycho," she said stiffly.
"True," he said. "I don't know about social merit--I've always thought that was a crock. Morality is the only way to judge art. Art that trades on what happens to be socially acceptable is only pop art, and who wants to spend their life painting pictures of soup cans, even if you can sell them for a thousand bucks a crack? I think The Night Creature is going to be an extremely moral book, at least by my own code. The portrait of the killer is drawn in blood. He's the most detestable human being imaginable...he makes me a little sick just to write about him. But that isn't the worth of the book. That's not what I'm writing about."
"Then what is?"
"The town," he said, and his eyes gleamed. "The town and the madness that spreads over it and poisons it. I'm writing about mindless evil--the worst kind of all, because there's no escape from it. No begging, no pleading, no logic will get you out of it. I'm writing about those hoods saying we're going to shoot you anyway. About Perry Smith walking from room to room and shooting human beings as if they were chickens. About Charles Starkwether and Charles Manson and Charles Witman. I'm writing about the mindless violence that wants to rip all of our lives to pieces. Have you ever seen Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera?"
"Yes; at B.U. It gave me nightmares."
"Then you know the scene where the girl creeps up behind him while he's playing that great organ and pulls the mask off and she sees what a monster he is...I want to do that. I want to rip the mask off and show people that the Grand Guiginol lives on the corner of your own street...and in your own house."
At the end of The Lot (II), after we meet Donald Callahan and before the chapter on Matt, King has this section on the town, completely excised from the published novel:
The town slept.
The cities sleep uneasily, like paranoiacs who spend their days in fear and their exhausted nights fleeing crooked shadows to that final hotel room where, as Auden says, it has been waiting all the time under one naked lightbulb. Their sleep is marred by the rising screams of the squad-car sirens, by the endless neon, by taxis that cruise restlessly like yellow wolves. Their sleep is sweating, fearful, yet vital.
But the town sleeps like a stone, like the dead.
Shops stand closed and dark, and there are only two night-lights: the sign which says POLICE and the lighted circle around the Bulova clock in the small window of Carl Foreman's Funeral Home. The clock hands stand at quarter of one.
Ben Mears slept, and the Nortons, and Hal Griffen, flat on his back with his mouth open, schoolbooks on his desk, untouched all the weekend which had so lately become Monday morning. Win Purinton slept, and his new puppy--given to him by the boys at the dairy--slept in Doc's old basket in the pantry, with a two-dollar alarm clock tucked in beside him to ease the loneliness that even dogs can feel. Eva Miller slept in her widow's bed, twisting laboriously through the night in a slow and subconscious dance of love; and above her, Weasel Craig slept the slow and heavy sleep of wine.
When you come from the city to the town you lie wakeful in the absence of noise at first. You wait for something to break it: the cough of shattering glass, the squeal of tires blistering against the pavement, perhaps a scream. But there is nothing but the unearthly hum of the telephone wires and so you wait and wait and then sleep badly. But when the town gets you, you sleep like the town and the town sleeps deep in its blood, like a bear.
Yet it did not sleep quite so completely as it had, because on the hill above town the lights shone from the Marsten House, as if the eye of the dark itself had opened and disclosed a fearful yellow pupil.
When Ben comes over for dinner at Matthew Burke's house, right after mixing his bourbon and water, and before eating spaghetti, he speaks of his financial state with Matt.
...as Ben sat down in the steel-legged kitchen chair with his drink, he found himself telling Matt Burke what he had not even told Susan: his financial state, which was far from rock steady.
"Yeah," he said, "Conway's Daughter did all right; for somebody, anyway. I got an advance of $3,000 against royalties and another three in royalties. The publisher and I split 50-50 on the paperback sale and the movie option, which was picked up by Columbia--and then put back down again when they couldn't get Robert Mitchum to play Conway."
"50-50's not usual, is it?" Matt asked, sitting down.
"No, but it's not bad for a first novel, which usually dies in the road anyway. And considering I wasn't agented, I thought I'd done pretty well. I came out with about eighteen thousand dollars, and I put half of it right into some safe stock. Which I'm now selling off, chunk by chunk."
"But the other books--"
"Well, I got a good advance on Air Dance, and the advance sales were good. The contract was a hell of a lot better, too, but the critics gave it both barrels and it didn't move very well after that. And just after it came out someone I--I liked a lot died, and I stopped noticing where the money was going for a while. I ended up in Las Vegas. I dropped the last of the advance money on number 16, red, and then rented a cabin in the most Godforsaken western California valley you ever saw. Didn't see anybody for weeks at a time. Wrote Billy Said Keep Going in two months. Holt House, which published the first two, turned it down."
Ben finished the rest of his drink, took a plate of spaghetti from Matt, and thanked him. He ladled sauce over it and twirled a forkful against his spoon. "Fantastic," he said. "Mama mia."
"But of course," Matt said. "What happened then?"
Ben shrugged. "When the script finally got back to me, I was in Mexico, living it up. And all of a sudden I realized I couldn't afford to live it up. I traded the Pontiac GT I'd bought after the paperback sale of Air Dance for the Citroen I'm driving now, and crept back across the border.
"That was what happened on the outside. Inside I was in shock. All my life I wanted to be a writer--not an author but a writer--and after I finally had it made, I started feeling it all slip through my fingers. I was in shock. Coming up through Texas on one of those long, straight stretches, I put the car up to ninety and started to feed the pages of Billy through the wing window. I had some crazy idea that I'd leave a trail of words all the way from the goddamn border to New York City, where I was going to throw my damn stupid editor out of his office window. After I'd fed about seventy-five pages, I suddenly came to my senses and hit the brakes with both feet...I left rubber for a quarter of a mile and damn near killed myself. I pulled over onto the shoulder and spent the rest of the day cruising back the way I came, picking them up. I got one hell of a sunburn, but I got all of them but six pages. I rewrote those in an El Paso hotel room and they're in the book. Better, I think."
"I haven't read that one," Matt said. "It's still--"
"--on reserve at the library," Ben finished for him, grinning. "Mrs Starcher told me. Susan hasn't had a chance to read it and she claims it's driving her nuts. Apparently it's been in great demand since I came to Momson. No place else but here, anyway." He laughed again, a sound that was almost a tuneless bark.
"You got it published, at any rate."
"Yes, and the critics were a little kinder--although there was still plenty for them to pick apart, apparently. After Holt, Doubleday and Lippincott both turned it down before Putnam's picked it up. I'm not sure how much they spent on p
romotion, but I'm sure you could have bought a bunch of bananas with it, if not the cereal to go with it."
"It died?"
"Not immediately, in spite of all that. It sold a fair number of copies, but the paperback deal is pretty horrible. They're promoting it sort of as a sequel to Conway's Daughter even though the two books have absolutely nothing in common."
Also in the chapter on Matt, there is a deleted scene in which Matt has a physical checkup with Dr Cody, and they discuss the Glick case and it is here that Matt mentions Dracula. This scene does not appear in the published novel but is referenced several times in it.
Matt's doctor was Jimmy Cody, a boy whom he had had in English some ten years before. Then he had been a little heller, but he seemed to have grown up nicely in medical school. Even his pimples were gone.
He sat on Jimmy's examining table and allowed himself to be poked and prodded and fingered while Jimmy asked him how things were going down at the old jail. Matt told him that things were fine; all the irons nicely hot and the manacles well-oiled.
Jimmy laughed. "You can put your shirt on, Mr Burke. You'll go another forty before you even need an oil change."
"That's what they all say," Matt told him, a little grumpily. He had confessed having some trouble with insomnia and Jimmy, referring to him by the old honorific of "Mr" all the time, had cheerfully refused to prescribe. Just wait, he told himself balefully, buttoning his shirt. Wait until you're sixty, fellow, and the high point of your day is having a good crap for the first time in a week.
Aloud he said, "It's a shame about Danny Glick."
"Funny you should mention that," said Jimmy. "I was at the hospital the night he died. Was called in for consultation, in fact. I was the Glicks' family doctor." He shook his head. "I've been thinking of writing the case up for one of the journals. Damn strange."
"I don't suppose you can talk about it."
"You're trustworthy enough," Jimmy said. "Just keep away from Mabel Werts and Ann Norton, if you please. They'd be seeing natives with poison blowguns in the bushes."
Matt laughed.
"The kid was found over by the window of his room. The nurse said he must have gotten up, opened it, and then collapsed. She called a doctor in--Dr Berry in fact--and Berry pronounced him dead. He noted a condition which is known somewhat unfairly as mortician's complexion, and it's not that rare, but...I examined Danny Glick the day before. He had an anemic condition, an acutely anemic condition." Jimmy shook his head and twiddled his stethoscope absently. "It was bad enough so I had set up a series of tests for the big C."
He ran.
In Danny Glick and Others, at the end of the chapter when the nurse finds Danny dead, there is another section with the doctor reporting on him, and the vampiric condition of Danny is revealed much earlier.
"Dead," he said, and began to pull the sheet up over the oddly calm face.
Her hand stopped him. "Doctor?"
"Yes?" He blinked at her mildly. He was a thin, intense-looking resident named Burke, and he was losing his hair rapidly.
"Those scratches on his neck are gone."
He looked. "Yes," he said indifferently, and covered the face of Danny Glick with the sheet. "Healed, probably."
"I thought he was alive," she said, and gripped her elbows to restrain a very un-R.N.-like shiver. "I thought he got up and opened the window and fainted. He looks like a...a waxwork."
"Really?" he said without interest, and turned away. "It's a condition that sometimes predates rigor mortis. Known in the argot as mortician's complexion."
"God," she muttered.
They went out.
Under the sheet, Danny Glick opened flat obsidian eyes and smiled. The teeth discovered by that smile were white and cruelly sharp.
After Ben and Susan make love in the park in Ben (II), they have a different discussion, a longer one, about the nature of the Marsten House and evil.
"The book?" she asked. "You were going to tell me about that before we were so sweetly interrupted."
"The book is about what happened to me at the Marsten House," he said slowly. "I can see it from my window. And the paperweight I use to hold down my manuscript is the snow-dome I had in my hand when I ran out of there."
"Ben, that sounds morbid. Morbid as hell." Her face was sober, and the flat glow of the streetlights milked her tan, making her look pallid.
"It is," he said. "But didn't I tell you writing was an act of exorcism? I'm writing this one out of my nightmares, and I wouldn't mind if I milked that reservoir dry. You know, the other three books were all quite cheerful...Conway's Daughter especially. They all had happy endings. Do you know what Brewster at the The New York Times said about the conclusion of Air Dance? 'Ben Mears reminds one of a mentally regressive street-performer doing a tap-dance on the gallows of the American prison system.'"
"I thought it was lovely," she said indignantly. "Just because you're not willing to go around and cry doom like Camus or Salinger or John Updike--"
"Do you remember when those hoods shot John Stennis in Washington, D.C.?" he asked.
"Sure," she said, puzzled by the abrupt change in direction.
"They held him up outside his house and after he handed over his wallet and watch, one of them said, 'We're going to shoot you anyway.' Then they did it. That's always haunted me. Or Capote's book, In Cold Blood. I was nineteen when I read it, and the image of Perry Smith going around and blowing the Clutters' heads off is as clear now as it was then. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be lying on the floor with your hands tied behind you and to see a man coming toward you with a shotgun, and knowing what he was going to do?"
"Ben, you're giving me the creeps."
"I'm sorry," he said. "This is hardly the place, is it?" He gestured at the dark around them.
"Go ahead," she said. "It's very important to me."
"Why?"
"Because it is to you."
He looked over to the right, and there was the Marsten House. The shutters had been pulled back--they were closed all day, every day--and the light shone out of the downstairs windows in rectangles.
"Those are kerosene lamps, aren't they?" he asked.
"Yes...I think so."
"Do you ever wonder who is up there?" he asked.
"Everyone in town wonders."
He laughed. "I suppose they do. I wonder if Mabel Werts has got the straight dope yet?"
She chuckled throatily. "If she did, my mother would have it, too. You can bet Mabel's bending every effort, though."
"The book is set in a town like Momson," he said, "and the people are like Momson people. There is a series of sex murders and mutilations. I'm going to describe one of the crimes in progress, from beginning to end, in minute detail. I'm going to rub the reader's nose in it. I was outlining that part when Ralphie Glick disappeared. That's why...well, it gave me a nasty turn."
"I can understand that. Ben, is it necessary to be so...so clinical about violence?"
"I don't know," he said honestly. "It does to me, in this book."
"Suppose you encourage somebody to commit a similar crime?"
"Do you mean like the kid who saw Psycho and then ran out and killed his grandmother?"
"Yes, something like that."
"I'd like to think he would have killed her anyway," he said. "That's brutal, I suppose. What I mean is I wish she hadn't been killed at all, but since she was, I hope Hitchcock isn't an accessory after the fact. You know, people used to argue that drugstore pornography, stuff like Beach Blanket Gang-Bang, encouraged sex crimes. Then the government did a study and said that was full of shit. Most sex criminals are Eagle scout types with severe repression problems--like the old inquisitors who used to stretch teenage blondes on the rack and run their hands all over their bodies, searching for witch's tits and marks of the devil--then reaming out their vaginas with red-hot pokers. The kid who masturbates in the bathroom over a skin magazine doesn't want to run out and rape a six-year-old and then cut her up. A shy, retiring bank clerk who has no sex outlets at all and who broods in his room night after night may."
"In other words, if a man is going to do it, he'll do it regardless."
"I distrust generalizations like that," he said. "If The Night Creature is published and six months later a series of crimes with the same M.O. crops up, I'd lose a lot of sleep. A writer who won't take moral responsibility may be a good writer, but he's a shitty human being in my book. And I think there are some writers who have made mistakes in judgment. In Airport, Arthur Hailey tells you how to make a suitcase bomb. There's a lovely description of how to hot-wire a car in Texas Whirlwind, by Norman Sullivan. There are others, too."
They had arrived at her house, and stood by the mailbox. The lights downstairs were on, shining out on the lawn, and looking in the front bay window, Ben could see Ann Norton rocking and knitting something.
"What's the rest of it?" she asked.
"Well, the house. The guy who lives there is a recluse, has been for years. People start to suspect he's the killer. They go up there and find out he's hung himself in the upstairs bedroom. A note is found. I'm sorry, the note says. God forgive me for what I've done.
"The killings stop...for a while. Then they begin again. The town sheriff begins to think, you know, that the real murderer killed the old man and wrote the note to throw the scent. He gets a court order and the body is exhumed. But it's gone."
"It's awful, all right," she said.
"People begin to suspect something supernatural...even the sheriff can't get the idea out of his mind. The book's hero is a kid named Jamie Atwood. He goes up to the house because he wants to join the big kid's club--"
"The hero is Ben Mears," she said.
He bowed. "Every author makes a guest appearance in every book, Susan. There, that's three generalizations about writers, and I told you that first day I'd only make one. That's breach of promise."
"Never mind that. What happens?"
"The old man is up there, awful and rotted, a real horror. Rope still dangling from his neck. It turns out in the end that the real murderer--the town librarian--killed the old man just as the sheriff thought, and then went one step further. Dug up the body, cut off the head, and--"
"Yes," she sai
"We'd all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other's minds," he said. "Do you know what made Poe great? And Machen and Lovecraft? A direct pipeline to the old subconscious. To the fears and twisted needs that swim around down there like phosphorescent fish. That's what I'm after. And I'm getting it."
"Does Jamie live?" she asked.
"No," he said softly. "He's the mad librarian's last victim."
"Well I think that's awful," she said, sounding upset. "Where's the redeeming social merit in all that?"
"I don't know," he said. "Where's the redeeming social merit in Psycho?"
"We're not talking about Psycho," she said stiffly.
"True," he said. "I don't know about social merit--I've always thought that was a crock. Morality is the only way to judge art. Art that trades on what happens to be socially acceptable is only pop art, and who wants to spend their life painting pictures of soup cans, even if you can sell them for a thousand bucks a crack? I think The Night Creature is going to be an extremely moral book, at least by my own code. The portrait of the killer is drawn in blood. He's the most detestable human being imaginable...he makes me a little sick just to write about him. But that isn't the worth of the book. That's not what I'm writing about."
"Then what is?"
"The town," he said, and his eyes gleamed. "The town and the madness that spreads over it and poisons it. I'm writing about mindless evil--the worst kind of all, because there's no escape from it. No begging, no pleading, no logic will get you out of it. I'm writing about those hoods saying we're going to shoot you anyway. About Perry Smith walking from room to room and shooting human beings as if they were chickens. About Charles Starkwether and Charles Manson and Charles Witman. I'm writing about the mindless violence that wants to rip all of our lives to pieces. Have you ever seen Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera?"
"Yes; at B.U. It gave me nightmares."
"Then you know the scene where the girl creeps up behind him while he's playing that great organ and pulls the mask off and she sees what a monster he is...I want to do that. I want to rip the mask off and show people that the Grand Guiginol lives on the corner of your own street...and in your own house."
At the end of The Lot (II), after we meet Donald Callahan and before the chapter on Matt, King has this section on the town, completely excised from the published novel:
The town slept.
The cities sleep uneasily, like paranoiacs who spend their days in fear and their exhausted nights fleeing crooked shadows to that final hotel room where, as Auden says, it has been waiting all the time under one naked lightbulb. Their sleep is marred by the rising screams of the squad-car sirens, by the endless neon, by taxis that cruise restlessly like yellow wolves. Their sleep is sweating, fearful, yet vital.
But the town sleeps like a stone, like the dead.
Shops stand closed and dark, and there are only two night-lights: the sign which says POLICE and the lighted circle around the Bulova clock in the small window of Carl Foreman's Funeral Home. The clock hands stand at quarter of one.
Ben Mears slept, and the Nortons, and Hal Griffen, flat on his back with his mouth open, schoolbooks on his desk, untouched all the weekend which had so lately become Monday morning. Win Purinton slept, and his new puppy--given to him by the boys at the dairy--slept in Doc's old basket in the pantry, with a two-dollar alarm clock tucked in beside him to ease the loneliness that even dogs can feel. Eva Miller slept in her widow's bed, twisting laboriously through the night in a slow and subconscious dance of love; and above her, Weasel Craig slept the slow and heavy sleep of wine.
When you come from the city to the town you lie wakeful in the absence of noise at first. You wait for something to break it: the cough of shattering glass, the squeal of tires blistering against the pavement, perhaps a scream. But there is nothing but the unearthly hum of the telephone wires and so you wait and wait and then sleep badly. But when the town gets you, you sleep like the town and the town sleeps deep in its blood, like a bear.
Yet it did not sleep quite so completely as it had, because on the hill above town the lights shone from the Marsten House, as if the eye of the dark itself had opened and disclosed a fearful yellow pupil.
When Ben comes over for dinner at Matthew Burke's house, right after mixing his bourbon and water, and before eating spaghetti, he speaks of his financial state with Matt.
...as Ben sat down in the steel-legged kitchen chair with his drink, he found himself telling Matt Burke what he had not even told Susan: his financial state, which was far from rock steady.
"Yeah," he said, "Conway's Daughter did all right; for somebody, anyway. I got an advance of $3,000 against royalties and another three in royalties. The publisher and I split 50-50 on the paperback sale and the movie option, which was picked up by Columbia--and then put back down again when they couldn't get Robert Mitchum to play Conway."
"50-50's not usual, is it?" Matt asked, sitting down.
"No, but it's not bad for a first novel, which usually dies in the road anyway. And considering I wasn't agented, I thought I'd done pretty well. I came out with about eighteen thousand dollars, and I put half of it right into some safe stock. Which I'm now selling off, chunk by chunk."
"But the other books--"
"Well, I got a good advance on Air Dance, and the advance sales were good. The contract was a hell of a lot better, too, but the critics gave it both barrels and it didn't move very well after that. And just after it came out someone I--I liked a lot died, and I stopped noticing where the money was going for a while. I ended up in Las Vegas. I dropped the last of the advance money on number 16, red, and then rented a cabin in the most Godforsaken western California valley you ever saw. Didn't see anybody for weeks at a time. Wrote Billy Said Keep Going in two months. Holt House, which published the first two, turned it down."
Ben finished the rest of his drink, took a plate of spaghetti from Matt, and thanked him. He ladled sauce over it and twirled a forkful against his spoon. "Fantastic," he said. "Mama mia."
"But of course," Matt said. "What happened then?"
Ben shrugged. "When the script finally got back to me, I was in Mexico, living it up. And all of a sudden I realized I couldn't afford to live it up. I traded the Pontiac GT I'd bought after the paperback sale of Air Dance for the Citroen I'm driving now, and crept back across the border.
"That was what happened on the outside. Inside I was in shock. All my life I wanted to be a writer--not an author but a writer--and after I finally had it made, I started feeling it all slip through my fingers. I was in shock. Coming up through Texas on one of those long, straight stretches, I put the car up to ninety and started to feed the pages of Billy through the wing window. I had some crazy idea that I'd leave a trail of words all the way from the goddamn border to New York City, where I was going to throw my damn stupid editor out of his office window. After I'd fed about seventy-five pages, I suddenly came to my senses and hit the brakes with both feet...I left rubber for a quarter of a mile and damn near killed myself. I pulled over onto the shoulder and spent the rest of the day cruising back the way I came, picking them up. I got one hell of a sunburn, but I got all of them but six pages. I rewrote those in an El Paso hotel room and they're in the book. Better, I think."
"I haven't read that one," Matt said. "It's still--"
"--on reserve at the library," Ben finished for him, grinning. "Mrs Starcher told me. Susan hasn't had a chance to read it and she claims it's driving her nuts. Apparently it's been in great demand since I came to Momson. No place else but here, anyway." He laughed again, a sound that was almost a tuneless bark.
"You got it published, at any rate."
"Yes, and the critics were a little kinder--although there was still plenty for them to pick apart, apparently. After Holt, Doubleday and Lippincott both turned it down before Putnam's picked it up. I'm not sure how much they spent on p
"It died?"
"Not immediately, in spite of all that. It sold a fair number of copies, but the paperback deal is pretty horrible. They're promoting it sort of as a sequel to Conway's Daughter even though the two books have absolutely nothing in common."
Also in the chapter on Matt, there is a deleted scene in which Matt has a physical checkup with Dr Cody, and they discuss the Glick case and it is here that Matt mentions Dracula. This scene does not appear in the published novel but is referenced several times in it.
Matt's doctor was Jimmy Cody, a boy whom he had had in English some ten years before. Then he had been a little heller, but he seemed to have grown up nicely in medical school. Even his pimples were gone.
He sat on Jimmy's examining table and allowed himself to be poked and prodded and fingered while Jimmy asked him how things were going down at the old jail. Matt told him that things were fine; all the irons nicely hot and the manacles well-oiled.
Jimmy laughed. "You can put your shirt on, Mr Burke. You'll go another forty before you even need an oil change."
"That's what they all say," Matt told him, a little grumpily. He had confessed having some trouble with insomnia and Jimmy, referring to him by the old honorific of "Mr" all the time, had cheerfully refused to prescribe. Just wait, he told himself balefully, buttoning his shirt. Wait until you're sixty, fellow, and the high point of your day is having a good crap for the first time in a week.
Aloud he said, "It's a shame about Danny Glick."
"Funny you should mention that," said Jimmy. "I was at the hospital the night he died. Was called in for consultation, in fact. I was the Glicks' family doctor." He shook his head. "I've been thinking of writing the case up for one of the journals. Damn strange."
"I don't suppose you can talk about it."
"You're trustworthy enough," Jimmy said. "Just keep away from Mabel Werts and Ann Norton, if you please. They'd be seeing natives with poison blowguns in the bushes."
Matt laughed.
"The kid was found over by the window of his room. The nurse said he must have gotten up, opened it, and then collapsed. She called a doctor in--Dr Berry in fact--and Berry pronounced him dead. He noted a condition which is known somewhat unfairly as mortician's complexion, and it's not that rare, but...I examined Danny Glick the day before. He had an anemic condition, an acutely anemic condition." Jimmy shook his head and twiddled his stethoscope absently. "It was bad enough so I had set up a series of tests for the big C."