Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 9

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 6: The Lot (II)

Sections 1-4

Sunrise: 6:53 AM

Sunset: 6:25 PM

It is 28 September. It is the day of Danny Glick’s funeral. A line of cars pass through the gates of Harmony Hill Cemetery. (The same gates from which the lifeless body of Win Purinton’s dog, Doc, hung only weeks before.) Many in the town have made the trip to pay their last respects or, in the case of Mabel Werts, to gather intel of a sort. Father Donald Callahan, the local Catholic priest, intends for the service to be quick in order not to prolong the pain of the Glicks.

After the funeral, in which Tony Glick has a breakdown and Marjorie Glick faints dead away,  Mike Ryerson approaches the grave to fill it in. His partner, Royal Snow, has not shown up for work. Funny that. Working alone and with the sun quickly setting, Mike feels as though someone — or something — is watching him. Someone — or something — within Danny Glick’s coffin…

Short and sweet entry today.

We say good-bye to Danny Glick. But not to worry…I have a feeling we will be seeing him again. As will his poor, suffering parents. As will a great many people in town. You just can’t keep a good boy down.

First things first, however — because this is one of those “The Lot” chapters, we get a wide-angle view of the town and its environs. The first section of Chapter 6 is a nice meditation on the change in the seasons. As I write this, we are experiencing fall-like weather here in Southern California. What do I mean by “fall-like” in the land of golden sunshine? Well…

“…[W]hen fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since he last saw you.

“It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the cloud that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drift. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die—migrate or die…”

Yeah, that’s what I mean by “fall-like.”

The quote above is one of the reasons why ‘Salem’s Lot is a fall favorite for me. I’ve lived in a bunch of different places across the United States — I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, but I’ve spent time in Savannah, GA, Raleigh, NC, and Albuquerque, NM. All of these places are quite different from each other topographically and meteorologically speaking, but as soon as days begin to get shorter, they all take on a similar feel. The air gets crisper, and one’s surroundings take on a Norman Rockwell-like nostalgic quality. It doesn’t matter if it’s 40 degrees out or 80. It doesn’t matter where you are, when fall rolls around, the human heart just knows it…and demands pumpkin spiced…well…everything!

Apropos of nothing, but there is another part of that quote that I’ve come to love for no other reason than it makes me think of something else I really enjoy. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the term “race memory” I can’t help but be reminded of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit.

Originally broadcast over the BBC as a six-part serial in 1958, Quatermass and the Pit was the third installment of the adventures of Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group. In this serial, the good doctor investigates some strange early human fossils found in a London construction site. Also found nearby is what is at first thought to be an unexploded German V-rocket, but which later is determined to be a UFO!

It seems that Martians had been fiddling around with human development millions of years in the past. Into the human gene pool, the Martians planted their own DNA and through that the race memory of violent purges on Mars that come to life in earthly, human history from time to time as the “wild hunt.”

Asgårdsreien [The Wild Hunt of Odin] (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo

As I said, it has nothing to do with ‘Salem’s Lot, but it has connotations to something dark in the depths of the human heart, some nearly forgotten memory that only comes to life at certain times of the year, something that rises from the dead to live again…

Speaking of rising from the dead to live again…how’s about that scene between Mike and Danny Glick? Brr! Scary stuff!

We are about a quarter of the way through ‘Salem’s Lot. We’ve had a lot of suggestive scenes of horror, but nothing much in the way of vampirism has happened. Until now. Mike Ryerson does more than just open the lid of Danny Glick’s casket. As we shall see, poor Mike inadvertently opens the doors to the horrors of the novel proper. Now, we can get down to the nitty and the gritty of ‘Salem’s Lot. No more dancin’ around the hot pie…we got bloodsuckin’ to do!

One quick little aside before we go — in Section 2, as Mike prepares Danny Glick’s grave for Father Callahan’s services, he recalls that that morning his buddy, Royal, wasn’t his usual chipper self. (We all know why Royal is feeling a bit down. Finding evidence of a possible child murder will do that to you.) Mike notes that his friend

“was usually full of little jokes and ditties about the work at hand (cracked, off-key tenor: ‘They wrap you up in a big white sheet, an’ put you down at least six feet…’)…”

The lyrics may vary from region to region, but those of you weaned on Alvin Schwartz’s seminal work Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark will immediately recognize the cadence those words carry. Royal is singing “The Hearse Song,” and according to Schwartz the song goes thusly:

The tune and lyrics to this song are quite old. The first known version was included by Matthew Lewis (no relation…though I wish!) in his 1796 gothic novel The Monk. American and British soldiers sang it in the trenches during the First World War. The poet and folk singer, Carl Sandburg, collected two versions of “The Hearse Song” in his 1927 book The American Songbag.

Poor Royal Snow was in good company and probably didn’t even know it.

Let’s break there for the day, kiddies. Tomorrow, we will finish talking about Part 1, Chapter 6: The Lot (II), Sections 5-9. We will discover the identity of “the boy” from the Prologue. We’ll talk rats at the dump with Dud. Why, we may even get to meet a certain antique dealer’s silent partner. But most of all, we will remember to…

It is 1 October. There are 30 Days until Halloween.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, but not for the usual, popular reasons. I am not, for instance, one of those adults who try to recapture some nostalgic notion of Halloweens past by purchasing every lawn decoration at the store. I don’t like parties, and I don’t like dressing up, so I am not into buying costumes. Aside from picking up a decoration or two to stick in the windows, carving a jack-o’-lantern, and buying a bag of candy just in case a few trick-or-treaters come a-knockin’, I don’t really engage in any outward celebration of Halloween.

That’s not the reason for the season, so far as I’m concerned.

Halloween is the film noir of holidays. It is a celebration of a mood and an attitude more than a specific event or person. As the end of October nears, shadows get a little longer, and the daylight hours get a little shorter. The air in the mornings as you walk to the bus stop (either for school or for work) is crisper and cooler than it was a month before. Sweaters and jackets come out of the cedar closet. The leaves - brittle, sear, and the colors of a 1970s basement rumpus room - fall from the trees to form crackly and crunchy drifts.

Like the colors of the leaves, attitudes become muted in this spooky atmosphere. You won’t find the hope of springtime here or the raucous energy of summer. In the fall, as Halloween approaches, there is a general turning away from our busy “outdoor” lives as we prepare for the slower pace and more introspective nature of our “indoor” lives during the winter.

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the darker, second half of the year to the sunnier first half. I prefer the hibernation of winter to summer’s hedonism. The quiet and the dark are places and states of mind that allow the imagination to wander, to speculate, to assume the worst. In the autumn, that sound you hear in the middle of the night isn’t the house settling: it’s the step of the thing in the closet. The light in the basement not coming on when you flick the switch isn’t due to a burned-out bulb, it’s the shadow monster dining on the light and hoping to make you dessert.

I’m a horror junkie, so Halloween is that time of year when the trappings of nature finally match my interior mood. The long shadows, cool air, and quiet streets lend an extra layer of creepiness to the movies I watch, the books I read, and the music I listen to. If you feel the same way, if you are tired of seeing Halloween celebrated, in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge about another holiday, as “a false and commercial festival,” then for the next 30 days this blog may be your one-stop shop for everything weird, creepy, and outré.