Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 31

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Epilogue

Sunrise: 7:12 AM

Sunset: 6:00 PM

A collection of newspaper articles clipped from the Portland Press-Herald. They all are dated from November 1975 onwards. All concern the strange goings-on in the vicinity of a small town in Maine called Jerusalem’s Lot. Odd sounds have been heard in the night, livestock have been killed, people have gone missing.

The man and the boy from the Prologue arrive in Portland, Maine, in mid-September 1976. They both rest and swim in the pool. The man reads the newspaper, paying close attention to the weather reports. The fire index has been set to its second highest setting. On 6 October, he announces to the boy that it is time.

Ben and Mark — the man and the boy — drive through ‘salem’s Lot. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead. There are new names on some of the businesses, but there are many more that are simply closed down. Homes have their windows drawn against the sun. Paint is peeling; grass is high.

Ben and Mark drive past the Marsten House on their way to Harmony Hill graveyard. There, they get out of the car and look around. Ben notes that authorities think that it was from just this point that the fire of 1951 started. He tells Mark that if the vampires’ hiding places are destroyed by fire, then they will hide badly the second time, and they could be found. Mark agrees. Ben flicks his burning cigarette into the tall, dry grass. It catches and the wind fans the growing flames…

First things first, Blog-o-weeners — Happy Halloween! Woo-hoo! It is the highest of the High Horror Howl-idays — heh-heh-heh! I hope you are spending the evening either going out trick-and/or-treating and then stuffing your bellies full of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews afterwards while you watch the Horror-thon or you are handing out candy to all the trick-and/or-treaters before calling it a night to eat whatever is left over in your bowls of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews before pulling the lever on your Laz-E-Boy and enjoying the Horror-thon. Either way…enjoy the Horror-thon! I hear Silver Shamrock is putting on one helluva a show tonight. Be sure to tune in and wear your masks!

Now…onto the business at hand…

We’ve not only reached the end of the month and the end of Blog-o-ween, but we’ve reached the end of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. Can you believe it, kiddies? Holy cats!

Our month-long trip through Stephen King’s 1975 vampire epic ends back where it started. We are with “the man and the boy” (who we now know are Ben Mears and Mark Petrie) as we were 430-odd pages ago. We also get a look at the horrors of the Lot from the outside viewpoint of some newspaper articles just like we did in the Prologue. Heck, we even get some more epigrams from George Seferis.

(Was there a 2-for-1 deal on quotes from the Greek Nobel Prize-winner? Jeepers!)

As I said at the start of Blog-o-ween, I do love when a book uses other forms of media, whether it is in the “meta” form of a screenplay or a play or, as we have here, newspaper clippings. We learned at the beginning that Ben has been keeping tabs on ‘salem’s Lot via the Portland Press-Herald. The clippings we are shown are from the eight months after the killing of Barlow. We know from descriptions earlier in the novel that the town of Jerusalem’s Lot is east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland in the southwest corner of the state. The datelines of the articles Ben clipped suggest that the remaining vampires seem to be slowing spreading their influence throughout the region.

It isn’t only the stories of grinning faces staring in windows or mutilated sheep that Ben is reading. He is also interested in the weather reports. It hasn’t rained in the area since the beginning of September, so the fire index has been set to five. The wind has also picked up. As someone who lives in Southern California, a lack of rainfall mixed with dry foliage and wind makes for dangerous wildfire conditions.

I’ve previously pointed out the influence of Jack Finney’s science fiction-horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers on King. In that book, one of the unsettling aspects of the invasion is that the pod people do not take care of the little town of Mill Valley. They seem to be okey-doke with the shoddy, rundown look of the town’s streets and buildings. It’s no different in the Lot:

“They had changed Spencer’s Sundries to a LaVerdiere’s, but it had fared no better. The closed windows were dirty and bare. The Greyhound bus sign was gone. A for-sale sign had fallen askew in the window of the Excellent Café, and all the counter stools had been uprooted and ferried away to some more prosperous lunchroom. Up the street the sign over what had once been a Laundromat still read ‘Barlow and Straker—Fine Furnishings,’ but now the gilt letters were tarnished and they looked out on empty sidewalks. The show window was empty, the deep-pile carpet dirty. Ben thought of Mike Ryerson and wondered if he was still lying in the crate in the back room. The thought made his mouth dry. 

Ben slowed at the crossroads. Up the hill he could see the Norton house, the grass grown long and yellow in front and behind it, where Bill Norton’s brick barbecue had stood. Some of the windows were broken. 

Further up the street he pulled in to the curb and looked into the park. The War Memorial presided over a junglelike growth of bushes and grass. The wading pool had been choked by summer waterweeds. The green pain on the benches was flaked and peeling. The swing chains had rusted, and to ride in one would produce squealing noises unpleasant enough to spoil the fun. The slippery slide had fallen over and lay with its legs sticking stiffly out, like a dead antelope. And perched in one corner of sandbox, a floppy arm trailing on the grass, was some child’s forgotten Raggedy Andy doll. Its shoe button eyes seemed to reflect a black, vapid horror, as if it had seen all the secrets of darkness during its long stay in the sandbox. Perhaps it had.”

Such is the kingdom of the vampires. Not very sexy, is it? Maybe dancing the night away to Bauhaus doesn’t leave a lot of time for painting the park benches.

As Ben and Mark stand on the hillside outside of town, Ben mentions that they are at the spot where many people agree that the fire of 1951 started.

“The wind was blowing from the west. They think maybe a guy got careless with a cigarette. One little cigarette. It took off across the Marshes and no one could stop it.”

But we, dear Blog-o-weeners, know how that fire started, don’t we? Way back in Part 2, Chapter 10: The Lot (III), Section 1, we learn the following:

“They know that a fire burned up half of the town in that smoke-hazed September of 1951, but they don’t know the it was set, and they don’t know that the boy who set it graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953 and went on to make s hundred thousand dollars on Wall Street, and even if they had known, they would not have known the compulsion that drove him to it or the way it ate at his mind for the next twenty years of his life, until a brain embolism hustled him into his grave at the age of forty-six.”

The town has its secrets, and many of those secrets seem intent on remaining hidden. The town will, so to speak, take them to its grave…heh-heh-heh!

Standing on the hills, Ben opens a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Back in the day, when I was a smoker, I was a Marlboro man. Most of the cigarettes for sale in the 1990s were filtered brands. I did on occasion, however, mix it up with unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls.

Filters were introduced in the 1930s by Viceroy, which was produced by Brown & Williamson. The first really popular filtered brand of cigarettes came out in the 1950s. Kent, produced by Lorillard Tobacco Company, found success thanks to a series of Reader’s Digest articles entitled “Cancer by the Carton.” These articles scared America’s smokers straight…or at least scared them straight to their local tobacconist’s to pick up a carton of filtered ciggies. Unfortunately, America’s smokers were unaware that Kent’s filters contained blue asbestos, the most carcinogenic type of asbestos. 

Whoops!

As he puffs away on all that tasty nicotine goodness (and I hope for the sake of the conflagration he is about to set off, Ben chose unfiltered Pall Malls—they just taste better), Ben looks at the emblem on the package of Pall Malls. Below the crest that features two lions facing each other is a banner with the Latin phrase “in hoc signs vinces” written upon it. This means “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” A rather fitting motto to have at the moment, wouldn’t you say?

People like to poke fun at the endings of King’s books. It: Chapter 2 (2019) made this a running joke as multiple people pointed out to King surrogate Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) that the endings of his books suck. The ending to ‘Salem’s Lot, however, is perfect in its open-ended ambiguity. Ben and Mark standing on the hill watching the fire spread, knowing that the job ahead of them may be too much for them, but agreeing to do it anyways?

Of course, we know that they may not have succeeded. It is unclear when the events of the short story “One for the Road” take place. At one point, a character says that “Jerusalem’s Lot burned out three years back.” A couple of paragraphs later, another character says, “…two years ago in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad.” So either Booth and Tookey go out to help Gerard Lumley find his family in a blizzard in January of 1977 or 1979. Regardless, it would seem that Ben and Mark were not altogether successful in ridding the Lot of its vampire infestation.

I wonder what happened in the months or years that followed the fire…

And that’s it, Blog-o-weeners. That’s all she wrote…or…all that I wrote, at least.

It’s been a blast sitting down everyday and writing about my favorite Halloween reading material. What I hoped would happen happened—by reading the book at a slower pace and picking it a part page by page I learned some new things about how it works as a whole. I also learned some interesting trivia about the real-life events and people and products that King mentioned. I hope you learned a little, too.

Man, I feel like the cowboy in The Big Lebowski…

This month has given me a little more confidence in using this space for future month-long, book-length read-a-long/write-a-longs. Maybe we don’t have to wait twelve months for Blog-o-ween to come around to enjoy each other’s company and a good book again? It would be fun to read another horror classic together. Or, maybe, a classic mystery novel? (I adore the works of Patricia Wentworth.) Keep your eyes peeled for more details…

I am still making my way through tv shows like Wings and Tucker’s Witch. I plan on posting more reviews on a more regular basis in the coming months…

Also, keep your eyes peeled for some original fiction by yours truly. I’ve got some short stories that I think would make a good fit for LARPing Real Life. I am also very, very close to having a completed first draft of a giallo novel in the bank. (There’s always room for giallo!) Maybe a follow-a-long of putting it into shape would be fun to share? Who knows!

All I do know is that when I talk about publishing posts on a more regular schedule, you all should…

Oh…and one more thing before I forget…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 30

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 48-50

&

Chapter 15: Ben and Mark

Sunrise: 7:11 AM

Sunset: 6:01 PM

Ben and Mark lower themselves into the basement of Eva Miller’s boarding house. After covering Jimmy’s body, Ben and Mark begin turning the place over looking for Barlow’s hiding place. Mark notes a Welsh dresser against the wall. They push it over to reveal a small, half-door with a padlock on it. Dousing a hand ax with holy water, Ben smashes the lock. His arms glow with an eldritch light that gives him the strength to batter the door down.

Inside the root cellar, Barlow’s coffin stands upright against the wall. All around it lay his children—the people of ‘salem’s Lot. Ben and Mark lift the coffin out of the room and open it. Barlow’s eyes lock onto Mark’s, and the boy tries to stop Ben. Ben flings Mark off of him, and as the sun sets and Barlow laughs triumphantly, he plunges the stake into the vampire’s chest. Barlow’s reign in Jerusalem’s Lot is ended.

The next day, Ben returns to the Lot. He leaves Mark across the New Hampshire state line in in the hotel they checked into as father and son. At Eva’s Miller’s, Ben burns the book he had come to the Lot to write and smashes the snow globe he had taken from the Marsten House as a souvenir. He goes downstairs and rescues Jimmy’s body from the basement. He find’s Barlow’s teeth and picks them up. They move in his hand as if they are trying to bite him. He tosses them aside in disgust. Before leaving town, Ben buries Jimmy and Mark’s parents in the Petrie’s backyard.

I know, I know…I can hear your complaints already, Blog-o-weeners: “Why are you featuring the death of Barlow today, the day before Halloween? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep that scene for the ultimate day of the month?”

It’s a fair critique, but…when have you ever had a class end on a high note? Usually, the last day of class is anything but dramatic. Like the first day of class, it’s mostly housekeeping—the teacher takes the role, there’s a general discussion of the highs and lows of the semester (favorite books, movies, what have you), you’re reminded to turn in your final project on time, and then the teacher wishes you a happy summer or winter break.

Blog-o-ween 2024 will not end much differently. We do have one more section to get through — the Epilogue — but then…after that…it’s just housekeeping.

But why are we wasting valuable space on what we are doing tomorrow? We’ve got a Master Vampire to kill today!

We’ve seen the effects of religious symbols before. Father Callahan’s crucifix glows as he smites the front door of the Marsten House. In Maury Green’s Mortuary, Ben’s own homemade (and punk rock) cross glows and keeps the feral Mrs. Glick at bay. There is a power in these symbols, one that seems to take a hold of whoever is wielding them to wield them in turn. Here, in Eva Miller’s basement, Ben uses one of the ampoules of holy water on an ax:

“It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy-light. And when he set this hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows. 

Power, humming up his arms like volts. 

The blade glowed brighter.”

Do not confuse this “power” with any particular religion. This is a rightness and strength older than any established church:

“Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt and split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power; it was whatever moved the greatest wheels in the universe.”

I’m for any universal, elemental power that would turn me into a Frank Frazetta painting!

When the coffin lid is lifted, we get a look at what feeding on an entire town has down for Barlow’s looks:

“He was a young man now, his black hair vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life. His cheeks were ruddy as wine. His teeth curved out over his full lips, white with strong streaks of yellow, like ivory.”

We also learn that for every Power of Good, there is, of course, a dark, mirror image. Barlow’s strength, even when the sun is still up, is overpowering. Mark is turned into an instrument of death by Barlow’s mere gaze. Ben, too, has the strength given him by the holy water drained from him by Barlow’s taunts inside his head.

And yet, for all of Barlow’s preening and triumphant crowing, he is in the end a big baby. Matt was right when he pointed out that Barlow’s letter held a picture of his overweening pride and that that pride would be his downfall.

(See…this is why you should always have an English major in your crew — it’s our job to close read and see between the lines of any given text!)

When Ben plunges the stake into Barlow’s chest, the vampire reacts in much the same way as when Mark spit in his face — he is full of utter disbelief. How could this be happening to me, he seems to say. His cries of “You dare not, you dare not…” are music to the ears. And I love Ben’s last, taunting words to him:

“‘Here it comes, you bastard,’ Ben sobbed. ‘Here it is, leech. Here it is for you.’”

It wouldn’t be a vampire tale without a look at the final dissolution of the bloodsucker. We got part of it with the death of Susan, but she was a newly turned vamp. Barlow has been around for centuries, so when actual death finally catches up with him, it is something special:

“The skin yellow, coarse, blistered like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like adrift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broomsticks clad in black silk. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Ben lunged out of the coffin with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Barlow’s last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal chords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.

Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a tight little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, protesting finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless expression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.”

Here’s hoping our own horde of undead, bloodsucking leeches disappear as beautifully and horribly next Tuesday.

Later, in Chapter 15, we are treated to one last glimpse of the state of ‘salem’s Lot. It seems that the monster movies got one thing wrong: when the Master Vamp dies, their undead minions remain undead. Section 3 is quick run down of the horrors that are still afoot in the Lot. Each tiny vignette is lovingly painted in the best E.C. tradition.

One last thing before we call it a day. As Ben drives through the Lot the next day, he is reminded of an album cover:

“The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock’n’roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title ‘They Only Come Out at Night.’”

The album he is thinking of is by The Edgar Winter Group. The record only came out in 1972, so I’m unsure how a three-year-old album can be “old.” This “old” record contains the great Edgar Winter song “Frankenstein,” which automatically makes it a Monster Kid jam.

That’s all for today, kiddies. As I said above, tomorrow we have one little piece of ‘Salem’s Lot to discuss — the Epilogue. It’s less than ten pages long, so you should be able to get through it rather quickly.

Can you believe that tomorrow is 31 October; it is Halloween? This month has just flown by…on bat’s wings (heh-heh-heh!). But don’t you go thinking that just because tomorrow is the last day of Blog-o-ween that you can let your guard down and relax. If you’ve learned anything over the previous 29 days it’s that it is best to…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 29

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 41-47

Sunrise: 7:10 AM

Sunset: 6:02 PM

Jimmy and Mark pull into the parking lot of Eva Miller’s boarding house. The smell of corruption is thick in the air. They go inside. While Mark searches for a flashlight, Jimmy finds the door to the basement. He enters…then the screams begin.

Later, after escaping the house, Mark drives Jimmy’s car rather haphazardly across town. He finds Ben walking down Jointner Avenue. Mark tells him what happened to Jimmy: the stairs leading down to Eva’s basement had been removed. At the bottom, on the floor, boards with knives sticking up from them awaited Jimmy when he fell.

Ben and Mark find Parkins Gillespie, but the Constable wants nothing to do with them. He knows that vampires are loose in the Lot, he knows that the town is dying, but he still won’t help.

Ben and Mark get back to Eva’s. It is ten after six; the sun has nearly set. They stand at the top of the cellar looking down and trying to steel themselves against what is to come…

Didn’t I tell you that we’d find out what happened to the rats in the town dump? And what did happen to them?

Abso-freaking-lutely nothing!

In his book on the history of horror, Danse Macabre, King tells the story of writing a scene so horrible, so disgusting, so gross, that his editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, suggested he remove it. What was the scene? What could be so barf-ilicious that an editor would have the temerity to ask the King of Horror to 86 it?

Rats, man, rats!

As King tells it:

“The scenes from Dracula which I chose to retool for my own book were the ones which impressed me the most deeply, the ones Stoker seemed to have written at a fever pitch. There are others, but the one…that never made it into the finished book was a play on Stoker’s use of rats in Dracula. In Stoker’s novel, the Fearless Vampire Hunters…enter the basement of Carfax, the Count’s English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martial a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals—cats, rats, weasels (and possibly republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time. 

…I decided I would let Barlow…also use rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem’s Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages on the novel, and to his day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what. 

… 

In the first draft manuscript…I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover—too late—that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller’s boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms. When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming. 

I was delighted with the scene as written because it gave me a chance to combine Dracula-lore and E.C.-lore into one. My editor felt that it was, to put it frankly, out to lunch, and I was eventually persuaded to see it his way. Perhaps he was even right.”

No, goldurnit, he was not right!

In a world where George Lucas thinks its okay to stick meaningless, dumb, CGI atrocities into Star Wars decades after it was released because it was his “original vision” (yeah, right), the fact that King has never gone back and put that scene of Jimmy vs. the rats back where it belongs infuriates me.

Luckily, we do have access to the scene as written. In the Illustrated Edition of ‘Salem’s Lot, King kindly gives us a section of “deleted scenes.” For the most part, these are scraps of scenes that didn’t make it through the editing process. They were rightly excised.

The scene of Jimmy covered in rats, however, stands out. It is, in King’s words, “out to lunch” — and I love it! It has a pure, Tales from the Crypt gross out factor that really elevates the stakes (Pun intended! Heh-heh-heh!) of what our heroes are up against.

One of the things that maybe gets lost in translation from the written word to the mind of the reader is Mark’s age. As the action unfolds and comes at us faster and faster, I think the reader loses sight of the fact that Mark is only twelve-years-old. So when he leaves Eva’s boarding house and begins screaming, it is a child trying to cope with the horrors he’s just witnessed. It is also a child who gets behind the wheel of Jimmy’s Buick and drives off. I think readers often forget about Mark’s true age and picture an older teenager. For myself, it is hard not to picture actor Lance Kerwin from Tobe Hooper’s 1979 tv miniseries, who was eighteen at the time of filming.

All that to say that Ben’s use of Mark dead parents to goad the child into action is really harsh.

“‘I’m scared,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They’re lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.’ He pushed himself to a final brutality. ‘Want to go back and look?’ 

Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurt.”

Jeepers, Ben—cool out! He’s just a kid!

One last thing before I let you out of class for the day—Parkins Gillespie. When Ben and Mark ask for his help, he refuses. In fact, he seems resigned to the fact that the Lot has become what it has. He even seems to think that the Lot deserves its fate:

“Ben heard himself say remotely, ‘You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you’re running out on it.’ 

‘It ain’t alive,’ Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. ‘That’s why he came here. It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ up the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheering’ em on.’ He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. ‘They prob’ly like bein’ vampires…’”

Parkins’s complaint is an old one, it seems—namely that the country is going to hell in a hand basket because of violence in media. Whether its violent movies or violent tv shows or violent video games or violent lyrics in music, it is always easy to point elsewhere and lay blame for society’s woes.

The Constable, however, may be on to something. Once again, if I may make the point I keep returning to, capitalism has had its way with the Lot for years. Now its Barlow’s turn. The sawmill collapsed and jobs dried up. The Lot is just a bedroom community for neighboring towns. There is no lifeblood coursing through the Lot. The town was dead before Barlow showed up. And Barlow showed up because it was dead. The people of the town were already vampires in a sense. They just didn’t know it.

Well…if you’ll give me a second to get down off’n my high horse…there we go…that’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. We have two days left—two days! Can you believe it? Ben and Mark stand at the top of the cellar stairs looking down into the darkness. What will they find when they go below? You’ll just have to read Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV). Sections 48-50 and Chapter 15: Ben and Mark to find out.

We know that Ben and Mark won’t find any rats down there, but what they do find…well…they should…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 28

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 33-40

Sunrise: 7:09 AM

Sunset: 6:03 PM

It’s morning in ‘salem’s Lot.

Ben, Jimmy, and Mark leave Matt’s room at the hospital and drive into town. The smell of decay and death is palpable. While Ben makes stakes in Henry Petrie’s workroom, Jimmy and Mark go out to discover where the vampires are hiding and to mark their hideyholes. While they are out and about, Jimmy suddenly flashes on what the blue chalk that Mark saw on Barlow’s cuff means—a pool table. Jimmy then recalls that Eva Miller keeps her husband’s pool table in good order in the basement of her boarding house. Barlow is at Eva’s! Jimmy and Mark rush off to Eva’s (without contacting Ben) to see if Jimmy is right…

Oh, boy, Blog-o-weeners…we are coming down to it, are we not? After today, we only have three days until Halloween and only thirty-four pages (or so…depending on which edition you are reading) left in ‘Salem’s Lot. Can you believe it? What a long, strange trip it’s been. (RIP Phil Lesh.) We can’t slow down now and look at where we’ve been, however. There’s too much to still cover in the few days remaining to us.

As our three Fearless Vampire Killers drive into town, the spread of the vampires’ control can be felt even in the light of day.

“As they drew closer to the Lot, an almost palpable sense of dread formed in Jimmy’s Buick, and conversation lagged. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read ROUTE 12  JERUSALEM’S LOT  CUMBERLAND  CUMBERLAND CTR, Ben thought that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date—she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it. 

‘It’s gone bad,’ Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. ‘Christ, you can almost smell it.’ 

And you could, Ben thought, although the smell was mental rather than physical: a psychic whiff of tombs.”

Their drive into the Lot brings them past Win Purinton’s milk truck — abandoned on the side of the road and idling with the keys still in the ignition. Although there are signs of life in the town, that life is of a strained and tenuous quality. Milt Crossen may be putting out the morning newspapers, and the diner may be open and serving breakfast, but these life signs are weak and getting weaker, like the heartbeat of a dying patient hooked up to an ECG. Foreman’s Mortuary is closed, the hardware store is closed, even the town’s latest shop, Barlow and Straker—Fine Furnishings, is closed. And I don’t think it will be reopening anytime soon. Mr. Barlow doesn’t seem as business-minded as his partner.

Once our FVKs are set up at Mark’s house, they make their plans for the day. While Ben operates Henry Petrie’s lathe and begins the arduous task of turn the family woodpile into stakes, Jimmy and Mark decide — once again, mind you! — to do what every game of D&D has ever taught us not to do: they split the party.

Granted, this isn’t like the splitting of the party that happened before. It was nighttime when Father Callahan and Mark visited the Petries as Ben and Mark and Jimmy went back to the hospital. It is daylight and the vamps will be in their beds as Jimmy and Mark stalk their way through the Lot. But have they not considered that Barlow probably has a few Straker wannabes floating around looking for them?

We get one last visit to the McDougall home. Every previous visit has been nightmare, and this one is no different. However, it does seem that tensions within the family have finally been resolved. It’s like they say: the family that sleeps the sleep of the undead in the crawl space under their trailer home together, stays together. Mark, ever the good Monster Kid, wants to test a theory out before they go:

“‘Wait,’ Mark said. ‘Let me pull one of them out.’

‘Pull…? Why?’ 

‘Maybe the daylight will kill them,’ Mark said. ‘Maybe we won’t have to do that with the stakes.’ 

Jimmy felt hope. ‘Yeah, okay. Which one?’ 

‘Not the baby,’ Mark said instantly. ‘The man. You catch one foot.’ 

‘All right,’ Jimmy said. His mouth had gone cotton-dry, and when he swallowed there was a click in his throat. 

Mark wriggled in on his stomach, the dead leaves that had drifted in crackling under his weight. He seized one of Roy McDougall’s work boots and pulled. Jimmy squirmed in beside him, scraping his back on the low overhang, fighting claustrophobia. He got hold of the there boot and together they pulled him out into the lessening drizzle and white light. 

What followed was almost unbearable. Roy McDougall began to writhe as soon as the light struck him full, like a Mann who has been disturbed in sleep. Steam and moisture came from his pores, and the skin underwent a slight sagging and yellowing. Eyeballs rolled behind the thin skin of his closed lids. His feet kicked slowly and dreamily in the wet leaves. His upper lip curled back, showing upper incisors like those of a large dog—a German shepherd of a collie. His arms thrashed slowly, the hands clenching an unclenching, and when one of them brushed Mark’s shirt, he jerked back with a disgusted cry. 

Roy turned over and began to hunch slowly back into the crawl space, arms and knees and face digging grooves in the rain-softened humus. Jimmy noted that a hitching Cheyne-Stokes type of respiration had begun as soon as the light struck the body; it stopped as soon as McDougall was wholly in shadow again. So did the moisture extrusion. 

When he had reached his previous resting place, McDougall turned over and lay still.”

Well, Mark, looks like stakes are still in play.

Afterwards, Mark and Jimmy go next door to the Evans’ trailer. The smell of death is strong, and the Evans family is found quickly. It is inside the trailer, as Mark uses the bathroom to wash off the horridness of his encounter with Roy McDougall, that Jimmy realizes what the blue chalk stains that Mark saw on Barlow’s clothing mean. Furthermore, knowing that there are no pool halls in the Lot, he quickly remembers that Eva Miller’s husband Ralph owned a pool table. In fact, Eva keeps it nice and clean…in her basement.

Next comes the second boneheaded move of the afternoon: Jimmy decides that he and Mark should head straight to Eva’s boardinghouse without telling Ben what they are doing. This is one of those moments in books, films, and tv made in the halcyon days before cellphones that make younger readers and viewers shake their heads. It is also one of those scenes that drives home just how on your own you were without a computer in your pocket. Without a cellphone, you had to know where you were going. You had to be prepared to be disappointed when you discovered that the store you were driving to was closed. You had to make plans hours in advance and hope that the person you were meeting showed up. You had to make your own fun in order to pass the time. As Count Floyd would say…

Before we call it a day, we should also address the sad and abrupt ending of the FVKs’ Van Helsing. This is a strange scene. Honestly, if King decided to cut it, it wouldn’t have really mattered — except to those pedants in the audience.

Matt’s death from a heart attack is not out of the blue. Jimmy himself said to Ben that while the attack Matt had in his house was minor, his next one would not be. This is the one moment that I feel the 2004 adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot gets right. Matt should have been killed by one of Barlow’s minions. He could have been given more of a heroes death, you know? I’m not sure who could have done the business—one of his students? Del, the barkeep? Loretta Starcher, the town librarian?

Say!…that would have been pretty juicy! It is noted that ol’ Loretta is an old maid and a virgin, and Matt never married. They could have had a little fun before Matt’s ticker gave out.

Well, that’s it for today, kiddies. Read Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV), Sections 41-47 for tomorrow. We will learn if Jimmy was right about Barlow being at Eva’s. We will also learn what happened to all those rats from the dump…or will we? Let’s hope that no matter what our FVKs find in the basement of Eva’s boardinghouse, that Jimmy and Mark remember to…