Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 24

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 7-15

Sunrise: 7:06 AM

Sunset: 6:07 PM

Eva Miller descends into her basement to get a couple of jars of canned corn. Instead of corn, however, she finds a horrible stench. For some reason, she calls out for Ed, but what would Weasel Craig be doing hiding in her basement?

Ben, Jimmy, and Mark all meet with Father Callahan. He listens to their stories and decides to join up with our group of Fearless Vampire Killers. He listens to their confessions, and the four of them head off to the Marsten House. They do not find Barlow to be at home. Instead, they are met by a handwritten note left behind by the Big Bad Vamp…and a certain someone that none of them wants to see…especially Ben.

Well, gang, this is it. This is the last week of Blog-o-ween 2024. We have been going strong for twenty-three days. After today, we will have seven days remaining in which to find out what happens in Stephen King’s 1975 novel of vampires in small town America, ‘Salem’s Lot. Will the Fearless Vampire Killers track Barlow down and stake him or will he put the bite on them instead? Who amongst our heroes will survive and who will fall by the wayside? What about all those rats in the town dump? Where’d they go?

As much as I love the 31 days of Blog-o-ween, I do feel a bit like Sisyphus. For the first half to three-quarters of October, I am pushing that rock up the hill, sweating my way through getting a thousand words a day on the virtual page. Then, suddenly, at about start of the last week, that rock starts tumbling back down, and it becomes a race against time to say everything I want to say.

Look out below!

Okay! Where to start today…

How’s about the beginning of today’s reading—Section 7. Eva Miller goes down into her basement and runs smack up against a stink. “Gosh’n fishes,” she says. This is a great little example of the kind of New England expletive we find in King’s work. It is a shortened form of the phrase “Ye gods and little fishes,” which was coined in the early 1800s.

Eva believes that what she’s walked into in her basement is a dead muskrat or woodchuck in the walls, but we’ve encountered that terrible smell before, haven’t we, Blog-o-weeners? Remember the smell coming from Dud Rogers’s tarpaper shack? When Franklin Boddin and Virgil Rathbun stumble into the dump custodian’s abode, they discovered a sickly-sweet odor that they thought smelled worse than gangrene. The smell in Eva’s basement is similar. I wonder what could be causing it?

The Fearless Vampire Killers meet up with Father Callahan to convince him to join their crew. Time is a-wastin’ and daylight is getting short, but Ben, Jimmy, and Mark all take the time to tell the priest their stories. Father Callahan has a moment when a cartoon comes to his mind. In it, a cleaning woman is sweeping the floor and is shocked to find that she has swept her shadow up. This is another wonderful bit of black humor from the pen of Gahan Wilson, whom we have discussed previously.

Later, after Callahan hears everyone’s confessions, the Anti-Vamp League drives to the Marsten House. It is already well after 2 o’clock. The sun is on the downhill side of the day. What they find inside shocks everyone — Straker is strung upside-down in the room where Mark left him. He’s been bled dry by Barlow. Father Callahan notes the way in which Straker was killed:

“It’s as old as Macedonia…Hanging the body of your enemy or betrayer upside down so his head faces earth instead of heaven. St. Paul was crucified that way, on an X-shaped cross with with his legs broken.”

Far be it for me to correct a Catholic priest, but it should also be pointed out that St. Paul was  beheaded not crucified. St. Peter, on the other hand, asked to be crucified upside down, because he felt he was unworthy of dying in the same manner as Jesus. The Romans, ever helpful, were more than willing to fulfill his last request.

There are more horrors awaiting our heroes downstairs in the basement. There, the stench of death meets them, but Mark notes that the smell is different somehow, weaker, less malevolant. Sitting in plain view is an envelope. Inside is a letter addressed to all of them. Barlow mocks them each in turn. He draws their attention to the gift that he left for them—the undead body of Susan Norton:

“In the center, on a raised dais and spotlighted by Jimmy’s flashlight, Susan Norton lay still. She was covered from shoulders to feet in a drift of simple white linen, and when they reached her, none of them had been able to speak. Wonder had swallowed words. 

In life she had been a cheerfully pretty girl who had missed the turn to beauty somewhere (perhaps by inches), not through any lack in her features but—just possibly—because her life had been so calm and unremarkable. But now she had achieved beauty. Dark beauty. 

Death had not put its mark on her. Her face was blushed with color, and her lips, innocent of make-up, were a deep and glowing red. Her forehead was pale but flawless, the skin like cream. Her eyes were closed, and the dark lashes lay sootily against her cheeks. One hand was curled at her side, and the other was thrown lightly across her waist. Yet the total impression was not of angelic loveliness but a cold, disconnected beauty. Something in her face—not stated but hinted at—made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with the girls, the corruption hadn’t been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan’s face was quite different—but he could not have said just how.”

The stake and hammer — the Craftsman hammer with the perforated grip, to be specific — is placed into Ben’s hands. What follows is a scene befitting a Hammer Studios Dracula picture…or at the very least Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It:

“The hammer struck the top of the stake squarely, and the gelatinous tremor that vibrated up the length of ash would haunt him forever in his dreams. Her eyes flew open, wide and blue, as if from the very force of the blow. Blood gushed upward from the stake’s point of entry in a bright and astonishing flood, splashing his hands, his shirt, his cheeks. In an instant the cellar was filled with its hot, coppery odor.”

Afterwards, Ben is sent out into the fresh air, while the rest of the FVK’s finish the job — cutting off Susan’s head, stuffing her mouth with garlic, and placing her in a weighted box for delivery to one of the rivers in the area. It is horrifying scene made more terrible by Ben’s feelings for Susan. That detail of the Craftsman hammer with the perforated grip is a typical King addition. The use of brand names makes the horrors both more mundane and more horrible somehow. The description of the scene happening under the trembling, stroboscopic illumination of Jimmy’s trembling flashlight also makes one imagine this all happening in a David Lynch film.

I think that is enough for today. For tomorrow read Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV): Sections 16-20. We will pick the action up as the Fearless Vampire Killers do what every good Dungeons & Dragons player learns at a young age not to do—they split the party! What punishments await them for undertaking such a boneheaded move? Whatever it is, I hope they keep it in mind to…