Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 25

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 16-20

Sunrise: 7:07 AM

Sunset: 6:06 PM

The Lot settles in for another night. This one arrives with the flapping of bat’s wings.

Ben and Jimmy go the hospital to fill Matt in on what happened at the Marsten House. While the three of them make their plans, Father Callahan and Mark go to the Petries’ house to let them know that Barlow has threatened their lives. Mr. Petrie is incredulous. While Callahan and Mark try to break through to Mark’s parents, the lights go out. Barlow kills Mark’s parents and faces off against Father Callahan. Mark escapes, leaving Father Callahan alone with Barlow…and his waning faith…

Section 16 is one of those wider views of the Lot that we get from time to time. The sun is setting, people are settling in for their suppers and, whether they know it or not, are preparing for a long, hard night.

Mentioned in passing are Dr. Dentons: “Young children are packed into Dr Dentons and sent into the other room to watch game shows on TV until bedtime.”

What now?

Dr. Dentons Sleeping Garment Mills produced footie pajamas that were designed to keep children warm at night if their covers were ever kicked off. Whitley Denton was an Englishman born in 1845 who moved to the United States at the age of three. He fought in the American Civil War and worked in cotton mills afterwards. His first forays into footed pajamas were for his own children. Denton worked to perfect his designs, working long, hard hours. He died at the age of 51. Two years later, his footed pajamas were awarded a patent and went into mass production in Centerville, Michigan. Denton was never a doctor. The “Dr.” was added to the name as a marketing gimmick. Pajamas were manufactured by the company until the late 1970s, when they switched the focus of their business to sweaters.

We now come to that moment in ‘Salem’s Lot that should have every RPG veteran screaming at the top of their lungs…

What on earth were they thinking?

While Matt does his best to cheer Ben up (“C’mon, buddy, you’ll get over staking your girlfriend and being covered in her blood from head-to-toe. Time heals all wounds, right?”), Father Callahan and Mark butt heads with Henry Petrie. If you thought Susan Norton’s hardheadedness was aneurysm-inducing, wait until you get a load of Henry Petrie! We know we are in trouble when we are told Henry Petrie, a registered Democrat, voted for Nixon in the 1972 elections.

Time to cut your parents loose, Mark! Cut ‘em loose!

Barlow’s appearance is almost welcome after listening to Henry Petrie well-actually-ing all over the place. It’s a finely painted scene: Barlow, with Mark in his grasp, on one side of the kitchen, Callahan, his mother’s cross held high and glowing in his hand, on the other. It is the symbolic battle of good vs. evil writ in broad strokes, but it works like gangbusters.

Can we give another shout-out to the greatest Monster Kid of all time for spitting in monster’s face?

“‘Soon, little brother,’ Barlow said, almost benignly. ‘Very soon now you and I will—’ 

Mark spit in his face. 

Barlow’s breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might have been: mere play-acting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder. 

‘You spit on me,’ Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shuddering step forward like some awful blind man. 

‘Get back!’ Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward. 

Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward. 

‘I’m going to kill you,’ Mark said. 

He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.”

Mark is, in the words of The Beastie Boys, as cool as a cucumber in a bowl hot sauce. Barlow, on the other hand, seems to be losing his grip. Or, maybe, he wasn’t as in control as he’d have us believe? As Matt tells Ben and Jimmy,

“I’m beginning to know him, I think. I lie in this hospital bed and play Mycroft Holmes, trying to outguess him by putting myself in his place. He has lived for centuries, and he is brilliant. But he is also egocentric, as his letter shows. Why not? His ego has grown the way a pearl does, layer by layer, until it is huge and poisonous. He’s filled with pride. It must be vaunting indeed. And his thirst for revenge must be overmastering, a thing to be trembled at, but perhaps also a thing to be used.”

In other words—

Sadly, in the end, Father Callahan cracks first. We mentioned previously, in the scene where Ben fashions a cross out of two tongue depressors, that what was at stake was faith. What would prove to be more powerful: the homegrown, punk rock faith of Ben fighting off Mrs. Glick at the morgue or the more “corporatized” faith of Father Callahan and the Catholic Church. Here, then, we seem to have the answer. As Callahan’s faith in the symbols of his religion strengthen, his actual faith wanes. The light goes out — figuratively and literally. The bright, flashing light of the cross weakens until it is only a material thing in his hand. Barlow plucks the cross from the priest’s hands and tosses it aside.

“You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…the bread and wine…the confessional…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is not wood, the baked bread wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.”

Barlow then enacts a scene from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: he forces Callahan to drink his blood in the same way Dracula forces his blood into Mina’s mouth. He isn’t turned into a vampire. Instead, as we shall see, Callahan is set free to wander the earth with the Mark of Cain upon him.

I said Mark of Cain!

With that, let us bring today’s class to an end. Tomorrow, why don’t you read Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV), Sections 21-32. There is a lot going on in those twenty-odd pages. Say what you want about the vampires of 'salem's Lot, but they are a neighborly bunch: Ann Norton shows up at the hospital (granted she isn't exactly carrying a "get well" fruit basket), the kids who ride Charlie Rhodes's school bus are up early to make sure they are ready to go (whether it's to school or to hell, we will find out), and even Corey Bryant shows up to prove that he isn't mad at Reggie Sawyer. Life really is nicer in a small town.

Meanwhile, as you leave class and head home — don’t dawdle! Get yourselves behind your own locked doors and into some Dr. Dentons. (Your own or someone else's.) You don’t want to be out and about come nightfall. If you do find yourselves out-of-doors…well…you’ll just have to...