Salem's Lot

12

The telephone wires make an odd humming on clear, cool days, almost as if vibrating with the gossip that is transmitted through them, and it is a sound like no other the lonely sound of voices flying over space. The telephone poles are gray and splintery, and the freezes and thaws of winter have heaved them into leaning postures that are casual. They are not businesslike and military, like phone poles anchored in concrete. Their bases are black with tar if they are beside paved roads, and floured with dust if beside the back roads. Old weathered cleat marks show on their surfaces where linemen have climbed to fix something in 1946 or 1952 or 1969. Birds-crows, sparrows, robins, starlings-roost on the humming wires and sit in hunched silence, and perhaps they hear the foreign human sounds through their taloned feet. If so, their beady eyes give no sign. The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep in the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

‘… and he paid with an old twenty, Mabel, one of the big ones. Clyde said he hadn’t seen one of those since the run on the Gates Bank and Trust in 1930. He was… ’

‘… yes, he is a peculiar sort of man, Evvie. I’ve seen him through my binocs, trundling around behind the house with a wheelbarrer. Is he up there alone, I wonder, or… ’

‘… Crockett might know, but he won’t tell. He’s keeping shut about it. He always was a… ’

‘… writer at Eva’s. I wonder if Floyd Tibbits knows he’s been… ’

‘… spends an awful lot of time at the library. Loretta Starcher says she never saw a fella who knew so many… ’

‘… she said his name was… ’

‘… yes, it’s Straker. Mr R. T. Straker. Kenny Danles’s mom said she stopped by that new place downtown and there was a genuine DeBiers cabinet in the window and they wanted eight hundred dollars for it. Can you imagine? So I said… ’

‘… funny, him coming and that little Glick boy… ’

‘… you don’t think… ’

‘… no, but it is funny. By the way, do you still have that recipe for… ’

The wires hum. And hum. And hum.