Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 12

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 8: Ben (III)

Sunrise: 6:56 AM

Sunset: 6:21 PM

Ben receives a phone call from Matt very early in the morning. Matt wants Ben to come out to his house, and to bring a crucifix.

Once they are together, sitting around the kitchen table, Matt tells Ben all about the night before and what he suspects. The two men go upstairs. Mike is dead, and the window is open. Back in the kitchen, Ben and Matt call the authorities. Dr. Cody and Parkins Gillespie arrive and begin the official process of dealing with a dead body.

Exhausted, Ben goes back to bed at Eva’s boardinghouse. Later that afternoon, as Ben walks to his car to drive to Susan’s house, Floyd Tibbits, ridiculously dressed in an old fedora hat, wrap-around sunglasses, overcoat, and rubber gloves, attacks him.

Well, we’ve survived long enough to put Part One behind us and to start Part Two. Good work, everyone! Let’s see if we can’t continue the trend.

Like Part One, we start things off with an epigraph. Or in this case, two epigraphs. The first is the entirety of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Anyone who’s been through the mill of a 20th Century American Literature college course or two has probably read this poem. I won’t dredge up any bad memories by engaging in a close reading of the work, but I do have to say that “whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds” is such a delicious line to say aloud. And speaking of saying the poem aloud, apparently Ken Nordine — he of the deep, resonant voice heard in many a commercial and movie trailer and spoken word jazz LP — recorded a version of the Stevens’s poem in 1994 set to circus music. Unfortunately, I can’t find that rendition, so here’s Nordine spittin’ bars about the color “Crimson”…

The other epigraph is from the Greek poet George Seferis. Born in 1900 as Georgios Seferiades near Smyrna (then a part of the Ottoman Empire, then occupied by Greece after the First World War, now a part of Turkey), Seferis served in the Greek Foreign Service, and later in his life became Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature.

‘Salem’s Lot features quite a epigraphs from George Seferis. The first began the Prologue (remember the Prologue?) and was a quote from Seferis’s 1938 poem “The Return of the Exile.” Here, at the start of Part Two, King chooses a haiku by the Greek poet. However, the translation that he uses is curious to say the least:

This column has
A hole. Can you see
The Queen of the Dead?

According to the copyright page of my edition of ‘Salem’s Lot, both the excerpt from “The Return of the Exile” and this haiku were translated by Rex Warner in 1960 for the book Poems polished by Little, Brown and Company. I have found another translation of “Haiku 14” that gives it a different feel:

In this column a hole:
Can you see
Persephone?

Columns and their holes make an appearance in another of King’s works: The Dark Tower. In the sixth book of the series, Song of Susannah, King writes,

“He said that writin about the walk-ins in western Maine taught him something he’d never expected to learn in old age: that some people just won’t believe, not even when you can prove em. He used to quote a line from some Greek poet. ‘The column of truth has a hole in it.’”

I suppose that that is the lesson we need to take forward with us as we read the rest of ‘Salem’s Lot. We are going to meet up with strangeness in the coming pages, and some characters are just not going to be able — or willing — to believe in the truth of said strangeness, no matter how much proof piles up at their feet.

Okay, okay…’nuff of the English major hooptedoodle. Let’s move on…

I think I’ve said this in the past few Blog-o-ween entries, but here is where the ball really starts rolling. Matt is terrified of what he heard the night before — the opening of Mike’s bedroom window, the evil laughter of a child, and sucking sounds. He is so terrified that he refused to check on Mike. He hid in his own bedroom for four hours before calling Eva’s and getting Ben up.

Four hours!

I feel for old Matt. I can recall laying in bed after seeing The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and being so scared by what I’d seen that I stayed awake ALL NIGHT! I could not fall asleep. Every noise in the house had me pulling the blankets up to my eyes, every dark corner seemed to writhe with preternatural movement. Brrr!

One of the topics up for discussion between Ben and Matt is whether or not the body upstairs in bed is a dead one or not:

“When you speak to Cody, don’t even say he’s dead.”

“Not dead—”

“Christ, how do we know he is?” Ben exploded. “You took his pulse and couldn’t find it; I tired to find his breath and couldn’t do it. If I thought someone was going to shove me into my grave on that basis, I’d damn well pack a lunch. Especially if I looked as lifelike as he does.”

“That bothers you as much as it does me, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes, it bothers me,” Ben admitted. “He looks like a goddamn waxwork.”

The determination of death in a body — and being horribly wrong about pronouncing someone as dead — has a long, proud history in horror fiction. This history of the trope, however, has a terrifying basis in reality. For much of human history, the chances of premature burial were uncomfortably high. So high were they that in the 17th Century, many people were interred with a bell tied around their finger. A guard was placed to sit at the gravesite for a period of time and to listen out for the tell-tale ringing of the bell. Hence, the meaning behind the phrase “saved by the bell.”

Bet you thought I was gonna post a pic of Screech and the gang, right?

And on that spine-tingling note…brrr!…let’s call it a day. Tomorrow, we have our second “Free Day” of the month, so no readings to prepare. (I heard that sigh of relief in the back of the class, ya smart alecks.) Instead, tomorrow we will talk about the other Stephen King short stories that feature the Lot. Should be fun!

In the meantime, while you are whipping your concupiscent curds (and what you choose to do in the sanctity of your own kitchens is y’all’s own business) remember to…