Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 30

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 48-50

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Chapter 15: Ben and Mark

Sunrise: 7:11 AM

Sunset: 6:01 PM

Ben and Mark lower themselves into the basement of Eva Miller’s boarding house. After covering Jimmy’s body, Ben and Mark begin turning the place over looking for Barlow’s hiding place. Mark notes a Welsh dresser against the wall. They push it over to reveal a small, half-door with a padlock on it. Dousing a hand ax with holy water, Ben smashes the lock. His arms glow with an eldritch light that gives him the strength to batter the door down.

Inside the root cellar, Barlow’s coffin stands upright against the wall. All around it lay his children—the people of ‘salem’s Lot. Ben and Mark lift the coffin out of the room and open it. Barlow’s eyes lock onto Mark’s, and the boy tries to stop Ben. Ben flings Mark off of him, and as the sun sets and Barlow laughs triumphantly, he plunges the stake into the vampire’s chest. Barlow’s reign in Jerusalem’s Lot is ended.

The next day, Ben returns to the Lot. He leaves Mark across the New Hampshire state line in in the hotel they checked into as father and son. At Eva’s Miller’s, Ben burns the book he had come to the Lot to write and smashes the snow globe he had taken from the Marsten House as a souvenir. He goes downstairs and rescues Jimmy’s body from the basement. He find’s Barlow’s teeth and picks them up. They move in his hand as if they are trying to bite him. He tosses them aside in disgust. Before leaving town, Ben buries Jimmy and Mark’s parents in the Petrie’s backyard.

I know, I know…I can hear your complaints already, Blog-o-weeners: “Why are you featuring the death of Barlow today, the day before Halloween? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep that scene for the ultimate day of the month?”

It’s a fair critique, but…when have you ever had a class end on a high note? Usually, the last day of class is anything but dramatic. Like the first day of class, it’s mostly housekeeping—the teacher takes the role, there’s a general discussion of the highs and lows of the semester (favorite books, movies, what have you), you’re reminded to turn in your final project on time, and then the teacher wishes you a happy summer or winter break.

Blog-o-ween 2024 will not end much differently. We do have one more section to get through — the Epilogue — but then…after that…it’s just housekeeping.

But why are we wasting valuable space on what we are doing tomorrow? We’ve got a Master Vampire to kill today!

We’ve seen the effects of religious symbols before. Father Callahan’s crucifix glows as he smites the front door of the Marsten House. In Maury Green’s Mortuary, Ben’s own homemade (and punk rock) cross glows and keeps the feral Mrs. Glick at bay. There is a power in these symbols, one that seems to take a hold of whoever is wielding them to wield them in turn. Here, in Eva Miller’s basement, Ben uses one of the ampoules of holy water on an ax:

“It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy-light. And when he set this hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows. 

Power, humming up his arms like volts. 

The blade glowed brighter.”

Do not confuse this “power” with any particular religion. This is a rightness and strength older than any established church:

“Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt and split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power; it was whatever moved the greatest wheels in the universe.”

I’m for any universal, elemental power that would turn me into a Frank Frazetta painting!

When the coffin lid is lifted, we get a look at what feeding on an entire town has down for Barlow’s looks:

“He was a young man now, his black hair vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life. His cheeks were ruddy as wine. His teeth curved out over his full lips, white with strong streaks of yellow, like ivory.”

We also learn that for every Power of Good, there is, of course, a dark, mirror image. Barlow’s strength, even when the sun is still up, is overpowering. Mark is turned into an instrument of death by Barlow’s mere gaze. Ben, too, has the strength given him by the holy water drained from him by Barlow’s taunts inside his head.

And yet, for all of Barlow’s preening and triumphant crowing, he is in the end a big baby. Matt was right when he pointed out that Barlow’s letter held a picture of his overweening pride and that that pride would be his downfall.

(See…this is why you should always have an English major in your crew — it’s our job to close read and see between the lines of any given text!)

When Ben plunges the stake into Barlow’s chest, the vampire reacts in much the same way as when Mark spit in his face — he is full of utter disbelief. How could this be happening to me, he seems to say. His cries of “You dare not, you dare not…” are music to the ears. And I love Ben’s last, taunting words to him:

“‘Here it comes, you bastard,’ Ben sobbed. ‘Here it is, leech. Here it is for you.’”

It wouldn’t be a vampire tale without a look at the final dissolution of the bloodsucker. We got part of it with the death of Susan, but she was a newly turned vamp. Barlow has been around for centuries, so when actual death finally catches up with him, it is something special:

“The skin yellow, coarse, blistered like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like adrift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broomsticks clad in black silk. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Ben lunged out of the coffin with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Barlow’s last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal chords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.

Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a tight little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, protesting finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless expression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.”

Here’s hoping our own horde of undead, bloodsucking leeches disappear as beautifully and horribly next Tuesday.

Later, in Chapter 15, we are treated to one last glimpse of the state of ‘salem’s Lot. It seems that the monster movies got one thing wrong: when the Master Vamp dies, their undead minions remain undead. Section 3 is quick run down of the horrors that are still afoot in the Lot. Each tiny vignette is lovingly painted in the best E.C. tradition.

One last thing before we call it a day. As Ben drives through the Lot the next day, he is reminded of an album cover:

“The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock’n’roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title ‘They Only Come Out at Night.’”

The album he is thinking of is by The Edgar Winter Group. The record only came out in 1972, so I’m unsure how a three-year-old album can be “old.” This “old” record contains the great Edgar Winter song “Frankenstein,” which automatically makes it a Monster Kid jam.

That’s all for today, kiddies. As I said above, tomorrow we have one little piece of ‘Salem’s Lot to discuss — the Epilogue. It’s less than ten pages long, so you should be able to get through it rather quickly.

Can you believe that tomorrow is 31 October; it is Halloween? This month has just flown by…on bat’s wings (heh-heh-heh!). But don’t you go thinking that just because tomorrow is the last day of Blog-o-ween that you can let your guard down and relax. If you’ve learned anything over the previous 29 days it’s that it is best to…