Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 19

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 11: Ben (IV)

Sections 8-13

Sunrise: 7:01 AM

Sunset: 6:13 PM

Susan just can’t toss aside her “can’t” thoughts, and she traipses off to the Marsten House. Alone. Still, she takes a piece of flimsy wood with her as a stake. You know, just in case. As she sits in the shade of the forest in the late afternoon and watches Straker leave the house and drive away, a hand falls on her shoulder.

Ben and Jimmy get permission from Maury Green to examine Mrs. Glick and sit up with her. Ben makes a makeshift cross out of tongue depressors. As the sun sets, Mrs. Glick’s corpse springs to life. She attacks Jimmy, but Ben fights her off. After she disappears, Jimmy fights for his life as he cleans the wound he received from Mrs. Glick’s bite.

After getting their stories straight about the lies they will tell the police, Jimmy and Ben are confronted by the county sheriff Homer McCaslin. He doesn’t believe the two men as far as he could throw them, but he has not proof. He lets them go.

At Eva’s, Ben looks out over the town and wonders if Susan is all right.

Ugh! Susan!

We knew it was coming. We knew that Susan would not be able to fight the urge to go off on her own, to prove to herself that everything that Ben and Matt believed in was a load of hooey. As I’ve said before, her rationality and her need to find out for herself are admirable qualities. A non-believer getting his or her comeuppance is usually a satisfying moment in a book or film. Here, I think the frustration I feel is fueled by how much I like Susan and admire her strength of will:

“She drove out along Brock Street, feeling a growing sense of pleasure and purpose (and a not unpleasant underlay of absurdity) as the house dropped behind her. She was going to take positive action, and the thought was a tonic to her. She was a forthright girl, and the events of the weekend had bewildered her, left her drifting at sea. Now she would row!”

Unfortunately, we all know that she is rowing her boat directly into the mouth of the shark from Jaws.

What? Y'all think yunz are better than Jaws II or something?

Slowly, she herself begins to sense the danger awaiting her. The closer she gets to the house, the more those feelings that she is doing the wrong thing seep into her mind. Her lizard brain — the limbic cortex — the most primitive part of the human brain, begins to send out its steady signals like a lighthouse warning ships away from a rocky coastline…Danger!…Stay away!…Danger!…

“As she neared the brow of the hill, she began to catch glimpses of the house through the steadily thinning screen of branches—the blind side of the house in relation to the village below. And she began to be afraid. She could not put her finger on any precise reason, and in that way it was like the fear she had felt (but had already forgotten) at Matt Burkes’s house. She was fairly sure that no one could hear her, and it was broad daylight—but the fear was there, a steadily oppressive weight. It seemed to be welling into her consciousness from a part of her brain that was usually silent and probably as obsolete as her appendix. Her pleasure in the day was gone. The sense that she was playing was gone. The feeling of decisiveness was gone. She found herself thinking of those same drive-in horror movie epics where the heroine goes venturing up the narrow attic stairs to see what’s frightened poor old Mrs. Cobham so, or down into some dark, cobwebby cellar where the walls are rough, sweating stone—symbolic womb—and she, with her date’s arm comfortably around her, thinking: What a silly bitch…I’d never do that! And here she was, doing it…”

It’s an old complaint of the horror movie viewer: “Why is that character doing that? I wouldn’t do that! That’s stupid!” It’s the same easychair criticism that the football fan engages in every weekend. The person who gets winded walking to the bathroom during the commercial breaks or who couldn’t throw a balled up napkin into a trash can from two feet away is going to know what to do on a 3rd-and-nine? Whatever.

I’m often reminded of my ex-father-in-law. An engineer. A guy who designed miniature railroad layouts and built Meccano ferris wheels and carousels. A smart man by any means of measurement. But I remember him testing our fire alarms by lighting crumpled up newspaper on our gas stove and walking the flaming torch through our apartment as ashes fell down and were ground into the carpet. Why would he do that? I don’t know. He should have known better. But still he did it.

At times like that, I often think of Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of “The Imp of the Perverse.” I think it is much more prevalent in our lives than we like to admit. Poe wrote a story by that name, but I think about his use of the perversity that runs and ruins our lives in another of his stories—“The Black Cat”…

“…And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

Maybe it’s because I am a horror fan and have traveled this road many times with many characters that I am more forgiving of the dumb choices that are made. I’m willing to chalk up a lot of what happens in a horror tale to a kind of nightmare logic. Why is that character going up into the attic? They are asking themselves the same thing. It’s is because they have no choice in the matter. The dream into which they are locked demands it.

Mrs. Glick.

Holy cats!

I know I keep saying this, but this is one of the scenes that will pop into a horror fan’s mind when ‘Salem’s Lot is mentioned. And, again, it’s thanks to Tobe Hooper’s made-for-tv adaptation. (Can’t wait to talk about it!)

This section — No. 10 — moves at a quick pace. There’s no need for King to dance around the hot pie any longer. We know the vamps are about—bring us the vamps! Sentences and paragraphs are short and sweet, moving us forward towards the nightmare as if we are on the back of a runaway horse we can no longer control. And when we finally are brought to the moment when Mrs. Glick sits up and calls for her son, it is terrifying:

“A slow, choked voice spoke in the stillness, as grating as shards of broken crockery: ‘Danny?’ 

“Ben felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. The form under the sheet was sitting up. Shadows in the room moved and slithered. 

“‘Danny, where are you, darling?’ 

“The sheet fell from her face and crumpled in her lap. 

“The face of Marjorie Glick was a pallid, moonlike circle in the semidark, punched only by the black holes of her eyes. She saw them, and her mouth juddered open in an awful, cheated snarl. The fading glow of daylight flashed against her teeth.”

Looks like Mrs. Glick got up on the wrong side of the mortuary table!

Like the other vampires we’ve encountered in the Lot, Mrs. Glick is no longer human. Her movements, the noises she makes — everything about her is uncanny, inhuman, and animal-like. She reacts to Ben and Jimmy with “a snarl, a dark silver sound, doglike.” When presented with the make-shift cross Ben made,

“Her features seemed to draw together, twitching and writhing like a nest of snakes…The sounds that were wrenched out of her were inhuman gibberings and hissings and glottals, and there was something so blindly reluctant in her withdrawal that she began to seem like some giant, lumbering insect.”

Ben holds her at bay with his homemade cross, but she sinks her teeth into Jimmy’s neck. Ben pulls Mrs. Glick off of Jimmy, and he comes face-to-face with the undead:

“Her breath in his face was foul beyond measure, the breath of tombs. As if in slow motion, he could see her tongue lick across her teeth. 

“He brought the cross up just as she jerked him forward into her embrace, her strength making him feel like something made of rags. The rounded point of the tongue depressor that formed the cross’s downstroke struck her under the chin—and then continued upward with no fleshy resistance. Ben’s eyes were stumped by a flash of not-light that happened not before his eyes but seemingly behind them. There was the hot and porcine smell of burning flesh. Her scream this time was full-throated and agonized. He sensed rather than saw her throw herself backward, stumble over the television, and fall on the floor, one white arm thrown outward to break her fall. She was up again with wolflike agility, her eyes narrowed in pain, yet filled with her insane hunger. The flesh of her lower jaw was smoking and black. She was snarling at him. 

“‘Come on, you bitch,’ he panted. ‘Come on, come one.’”

Not a bad bit of work for a holy symbol made from tongue depressors and tape!

There is something more to be made from the homemade quality of Ben’s cross. Later, we will see a more official-looking cross fail in its duty to its wielder. What is the difference? Isn’t a cross a cross?

One of the things to keep in mind as we ponder these questions is to remember what Father Callahan was thinking to himself as he cleaned up his spilled whisky. He was pondering the changes in the Catholic Church that had happened only ten years earlier. The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (or Vatican II, which makes it seem like a movie sequel — Vatican II: Electric Boogaloo!) was called together by Pope John XXIII in 1962 to update the Church for an increasingly secularized society. That was all well and good, but Father Callahan bemoans the loss of the purpose and tradition by such a change.

What we will see happen as the novel continues is this battle between Ben’s faith and Father Callahan’s. One is rooted in the heart of the believer and is much older than churches and councils, the other is caught up in the gewgaws of officialdom. You can think of it as a battle between punk rock and corporate rock, and y’all know which side of that divide LARPing Real Life falls on…

Whew! What a day! I didn’t expect to go on as long as all that. Not to worry, Blog-o-weeners, tomorrow is another one of our free days, and we will be taking it easy. We’ll talk about other books that mention the Lot and its characters. There aren’t many, but the ones that do are big’uns!

So, no reading to do tonight. It’s Saturday…go out and enjoy yourselves. But if you suddenly get the urge to do something perverse…well, it’s best to…