Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 11

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 7: Matt

Sunrise: 6:55 AM

Sunset: 6:23 PM

Ben meets Matt at the local high school and has a rap session with the kids there. Later, Ben has dinner at Matt’s house. They discuss Ben’s book, the disappearance of Ralphie Glick, and the connections between Ralphie and other disappearances in the area during the 1930s. They make plans to take a drive up to the Marsten House later in the week and welcome the new owners.

Later that week, Matt takes a trip out to Dell’s for a late-night brewski. He meets Mike Ryerson, who looks to the old teacher like he is on hard drugs. Mike says he is sick. He has slept the days away ever since Danny Glick’s funeral. At night, he says, he has the sweetest, scariest dreams of red eyes staring at him. Matt invites Mike back to his house for the night so that he can take him to his doctor, Jimmy Cody, the next morning.

That night, as he lays in bed, Matt hears Mike talking to someone…someone outside his second floor window. Matt hears Mike invite this person in. Then, he hears a child’s laugh…and sucking sounds…

Hoo-boy! Before we make with all the inviting and laughing and biting and sucking, let’s talk a few little details from the non-Nosferatu sections.

When it comes to politically correct language, I am 98% for whatever changes and updates are made. People have preferred pronouns? I use ‘em! People have a preferred gender identity? I recognize it and use it! I grew up in a time when some pretty ugly language got thrown around willy-nilly. The T-word, J-word, the G-word, the R-word, the N-word — I’ll let you figure out what’s what in your dirty little bigoted minds — these should be relegated to ancient history ASAP.

However…

…when it comes to replacing simple, straightforward words with multi-syllabic, fancy titles, I must put my foot down. I am not going to say “sanitation engineer” when “garbageman (or woman)” fits the bill. I’m not trading in three or four syllables for seven. And if I’m not going to do that, I sure as hell am not going to call the kids attending 'salem's Lot High School a “homogenous mid-teen coeducational student body.” You must be out yer damn mind!

Moving on…

Matt’s house is a pretty inviting place. (Oooo…there’s that word again — invite!) When Ben enters he is met by “a small living room furnished in Early American Junk Shop.” I can appreciate that style. Just as Ben says he’s a kitchen table eater who comes from a long line of kitchen table eaters, my personal furnishing style is rag-tag and catch-as-catch-can. Matching chairs? I’m lucky if the silverware matches!

One of the items sitting in Matt’s living room is a KLH sound system with quad speakers. KLH Research and Development Corporation was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1957. The company takes its name from the initials of its founders: Henry Kloss, Malcolm S. Low, and Josef Anton Hofmann. At one time, KLH was the largest loudspeaker company in the world, responsible for many “firsts”:

• the first-ever high-selectivity FM table radio, the Model Eight

• the first full-range electrostatic loudspeaker, the Model Nine (which many audiophiles consider to the one of the best loudspeakers ever built)

• the first portable solid state record player, the Model Eleven

• the first reel-to-reel tape recorder to feature the Dolby noise reduction, the Model Forty.

Boy-oh-boy, Matt sure knows how to rock out with the best!

For all his “junk shop” leanings, Matt is not above getting fancy with the dinner drinks, however. He tells Ben to look for a bottle of Lancers in the refrigerator. Lancers was started in 1944 by Henry Behar, who was searching for a rosé wine that would please the American palate. He found what he was looking for in the wine cellars of José Maria da Fonseca of the Palmela region of Portugal. Lancers’s medium-sweet, sparkling wine was an immediate hit, selling over a million boxes a year by the 1970s. It is still produced to this day, so you can maybe pour yourself a glass while reading ‘Salem’s Lot!

Now, let’s get down and dirty…

Ben gives us another glimpse into the book he’s been writing in the Lot. He’s writing it the money, he fully admits, so he’s making it a juicy horror novel that begins with a long, drawn out murder. Matt asks if Ben is basing the book on the disappearances of the 1930s. Ben is taken aback, but Matt assures him that there are many older residents in the town that have already made the connections between the current disappearance of Ralphie Glick and the vanishing of other children the last time the Marten House was occupied. The town’s conscience and consciousness — as well as its rumor mill — is in full swing.

Matt also mentions the death of Danny Glick. Matt’s doctor, Jimmy Cody, was called in to consult on Danny’s case. It seems that Danny’s red blood cell was way, way down. He was given B-12 injections and was getting better, but then he died suddenly.

Strange that, don’cha think?

Things get even stranger when Matt gets together with Mike Ryerson. Matt, it seems, is primed for what is to come in the rest of the novel. As Mike tells his story about falling asleep in Harmony Hill Cemetery, about the filling in of Danny Glick’s grave (which he doesn’t recall doing at all), the dreams he’s been having about red eyes and sweet singing, about sleeping all day and having no desire to eat when he wakes up (food and drink, in fact, make him ill), Matt seems to be putting two and two together pretty quickly. We already know that, although he isn’t a native of the town, Matt knows quite a bit of its history, especially where the Marsten House is concerned. We also know that he has the mystery of Danny Glick’s demise (the low red blood cell count, etc.) at the back of his mind. So when Matt sees red marks on Mike’s throat, his mind is made up.

Matt thinks of two texts as he lies in bed wondering if he’s crazy for what he’s believing is the cause of Mike’s “sickness.” One is, of course, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The other is a lesser known work (at least to non-English major Monster Kids): Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel.”

Close…but wrong Cristabel.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 

And slowly rolled her eyes around; 

Then drawing in her breath aloud, 

Like one that shuddered, she unbound 

The cincture from beneath her breast: 

Her silken robe, and inner vest, 

Dropt to her feet, and full in view, 

Behold! her bosom and half her side— 

A sight to dream of, not to tell! 

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

“Christabel” is an unfinished poem that tells the story of a young woman, Christabel, who enters the forest to pray. There, she discovers another young woman, Geraldine.

Not that Geraldine.

Geraldine tells Christabel that she is alone, having escaped from a group of men who tried to abduct her. Taking pity on the girl, Christabel invites Geraldine back to her home. (There’s that word again — invite!) There are many supernatural signs that Geraldine may not be who or what she purports herself to be — animals moaning in their sleep as she passes by, torchlight fading and returning in her presence, her inability to cross an iron doorway, her refusal to pray. Christabel and her family soon fall under the spell of the malign Geraldine.

The story of Christabel fits Matt’s state of mind perfectly, no?

One last thing to talk about is a word that pops up in King’s work from time to time. At Dell’s, Mike tells Matt that he became frightened at his home for no good reason: 

“I got scared before I went to bed. Just like a kid afraid of the Allamagoosalum.”

The what now?

Plenty of King fans have tried to track down the history of the Allamagoosalum, but to no avail. King may have picked the word up from a 1955 science fiction short story by English author Eric Frank Russell, “Allamagoosa.” In this story, a spaceship crew creates a meaningless contraption called an “offog” in order to pass inspection. In this context, an allamagoosa is the name given to something unknown — kind of like a “thingamajig” or a “doohickie.” Still, Allamagoosalum has a nice ring to it, and in the context of Mike being afraid of it like a child, one can imagine a New England urban legend of some kind, something that would be passed back and forth across a campfire or a sleepover.

Well, that’s the end of today’s readings, as well as the end of Part One of ‘Salem’s Lot. Tomorrow, I want you to read Part 2, Chapter 8: Ben (III). We’ll find out what happened to Mike Ryerson, and just who Mike invited into Matt’s house.

In the meantime, keep in mind that if you find young women wondering around the woods at night, you might want to…