Salem's Lot

3

They were walking, first aimlessly through the park, and then with more purpose toward Brock Street.

‘Are you sorry?’ he asked.

She looked up at him and smiled without artifice. ‘No. I’m glad.’

‘Good.’

They walked hand in hand without speaking.

‘The book?’ she asked. ‘You were going to tell me about that before we were so sweetly interrupted.’

‘The book is about the Marsten House,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe it didn’t start out to be, not wholly. I thought it was going to be about this town. But maybe I’m fooling myself. I researched Hubie Marsten, you know. He was a mobster. The trucking company was just a front.’

She was looking at him in wonder. ‘How did you find that out?’

‘Some from the Boston police, and more from a woman named Minella Corey, Birdie Marsten’s sister. She’s seventy-nine now, and she can’t remember what she had for breakfast, but she’s never forgotten a thing that happened before 1940.’

‘And she told you-’

‘As much as she knew. She’s in a nursing home in New Hampshire, and I don’t think anyone’s really taken the time to listen to her in years. I asked her if Hubert Marsten had really been a contract killer in the Boston area-the police sure thought he was-and she nodded. "How many?" I asked her. She held her fingers up in front of her eyes and waggled them back and forth and said, "How many times can you count these?"‘

‘My God.’

‘The Boston organization began to get very nervous about Hubert Marsten in 1927,’ Ben went on. ‘He was picked up for questioning twice, once by the city police and once by the Maiden police. The Boston grab was for a gangland killing, and he was back on the street in two hours. The thing in Malden wasn’t business at all. It was the murder of an eleven-year-old boy. The child had been eviscerated.’

‘Ben,’ she said, and her voice was sick.

‘Marsten’s employers got him off the hook-I imagine he knew where a few bodies were buried-but that was the end of him in Boston. He moved quietly to ‘salem’s Lot, just a retired trucking official who got a check once a month. He didn’t go out much. At least, not much that we know of.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve spent a lot of time in the library looking at old copies of the Ledger from 1928 to 1939. Four children disappeared in that period. Not that unusual, not in a rural area. Kids get lost, and they sometimes die of exposure. Sometimes kids get buried in a gravelpit slide. Not nice, but it happens.’

‘But you don’t think that’s what happened?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that not one of those four were ever found. No hunter turning up a skeleton in 1945 or a contractor digging one up while getting a load of gravel to make cement. Hubert and Birdie lived in that house for eleven years and the kids disappeared, and that’s all anyone knows. But I keep thinking about that kid in Maiden. I think about that a lot. Do you know The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson?’

‘Yes.’

He quoted softly, "‘And whatever walked there, walked alone." You asked what my book was about. Essentially, it’s about the recurrent power of evil.’

She put her hands on his arm. ‘You don’t think that Ralphie Glick… ’

‘Was gobbled up by the revengeful spirit of Hubert Marsten, who comes back to life on every third year at the full of the moon?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You’re asking the wrong person if you want to be reassured. Don’t forget, I’m the kid who opened the door to an upstairs bedroom and saw him hanging from a beam.’ ‘That’s not an answer.’

‘No, it’s not. Let me tell you one other thing before I tell you exactly what I think. Something Minella Corey said. She said there are evil men in the world, truly evil men. Sometimes we hear of them, but more often they work in absolute darkness. She said she had been cursed with a knowledge of two such men in her lifetime. One was Adolf Hitler. The other was her brother-in-law, Hubert Marsten.’ He paused. ‘She said that on the day Hubie shot her sister she was three hundred miles away in Cape Cod. She had taken a job as housekeeper for a rich family that summer. She was making a tossed salad in a large wooden bowl. It was quarter after two in the afternoon. A bolt of pain, "like lightning," she said, went through her head and she heard a shotgun blast. She fell on the floor, she claims. When she picked herself up-she was alone in the house-twenty minutes had passed. She looked in the wooden bowl and screamed. It appeared to her that it was full of blood.’

‘God,’ Susan murmured.

‘A moment later, everything was normal again. No headache, nothing in the salad bowl but salad. But she said she knew-she knew-that her sister was dead, murdered with a shotgun.’

‘That’s her unsubstantiated story?’

‘Unsubstantiated, yes. But she’s not some oily trickster; she’s an old woman without enough brains left to lie. That part doesn’t bother me, anyway. Not very much, at least. There’s a large enough body of ESP data now so that a rational man laughs it off at his own expense. The idea that Birdie transmitted the facts of her death three hundred miles over a kind of psychic telegraph isn’t half so hard for me to believe as the face of evil-the really monstrous face-that I sometimes think I can see buried in the outlines of that house.

‘You asked me what I think. I’ll tell you. I think it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.’

He looked up at the Marsten House and spoke slowly.

‘I think that house might be Hubert Marsten’s monument to evil, a kind of psychic sounding board. A supernatural beacon, if you like. Sitting there all these years, maybe holding the essence of Hubie’s evil in its old, moldering bones.

‘And now it’s occupied again.

‘And there’s been another disappearance.’ He turned to her and cradled her upturned face in his hands. ‘You see, that’s something I never counted on when I came back here. I thought the house might have been torn down, but never in my wildest dreams that it had been bought. I saw myself renting it and oh, I don’t know. Confronting my own terrors and evils, maybe. Playing ghostbreaker, maybe-be gone in the name of all the saints, Hubie. Or maybe just tapping into the atmosphere of the place to write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars. But no matter what, I felt that I was in control of the situation, and that would make all the difference. I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore, ready to run screaming from a magic-lantern show that maybe came out of my own mind and no place else. But now… ’

‘Now what, Ben?’

‘Now it’s occupied!’ he burst out, and beat a fist into his palm. ‘I’m not in control of the situation. A little boy has disappeared and I don’t know what to make of it. It could have nothing to do with that house, but… I don’t believe it.’ The last four words came out in measured lengths.

‘Ghosts? Spirits?’

‘Not necessarily. Maybe just some harmless guy who admired the house when he was a kid and bought it and became… possessed.’

‘Do you know something about-’ she began, alarmed.

‘The new tenant? No. I’m just guessing. But if it is the house, I’d almost rather it was possession than something else.’

What?’

He said simply, ‘Perhaps it’s called another evil man.’