'Salem's Lot(103)

'You're quite a boy,' she said.

'No, I'm not,' he said, his composure unruffled by the praise. 'But I'm going to get rid of him.' He looked up at the house.

'Are you sure - '

'Sure I am. So're you. Can't you feel how bad he is? Doesn't that house make you afraid, just looking at it?'

'Yes,' she said simply, giving in to him. His logic was the logic of nerve endings, and unlike Ben's or Matt's, it was resistless.

'How are we going to do it?' she asked, automatically giving over the leadership of the venture to him.

'Just go up there and break in,' he said. 'Find him, pound the stake - my stake - through his heart, and get out again. He's probably down cellar. They like dark places. Did you bring a flashlight?'

'No.'

'Damn it, neither did I.' He shuffled his sneakered feet aimlessly in the leaves for a moment. 'Probably didn't bring a cross either, did you?'

'Yes, I did,' Susan said. She pulled the link chain out of her blouse and showed him. He nodded and then pulled a chain out of his own shirt.

'I hope I can get this back before my folks come home,' he said gloomily. 'I crooked it from my mother's jewelry box. I'll catch hell if she finds out.' He looked around. The shadows had lengthened even as they talked, and they both felt an impulse to delay and delay.

'When we find him, don't look in his eyes,' Mark told her. 'He can't move out of his coffin, not until dark, but he can still book you with his eyes. Do you know anything religious by heart?'

They had started through the bushes between the woods and the unkempt lawn of the Marsten House.

'Well, the Lord's Prayer - '

'Sure, that's good. I know that one, too. We'll both say it while I pound the stake in.'

He saw her expression, revolted and half flagging, and he took her hand and squeezed it. His self-possession was disconcerting. 'Listen, we have to. I bet he's got half the town after last night. If we wait any longer, he'll have it all. It will go fast, now.'

'After last night?'

'I dreamed it,' Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. 'I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real.'

'Just a dream,' she said uneasily.

'I bet there's a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they've got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don't want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke.'

'How do you know so much?'

'I read the monster magazines,' he said, 'and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I'm going to see Walt Disney. And you can't trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier.'

They were at the side of the house. Say, we're quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-?cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are para?noid fantasies catching?

She believed.

As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more funda?mental voice that was screaming danger! danger! in words that were not words at all. Her heart-beat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body's wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.

She peered through a break in the lower shutters. 'Why, they haven't done a thing to it,' she said almost angrily. 'It's a mess.'

'Let me see. Boost me up.'

She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room's upper corners, near the ceiling.

Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and?-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.

'Hey!' she protested. 'You shouldn't - '

'What do you want to do? Ring the doorbell?'

He accordioned back the right-hand shutter and rapped one of the dusty, wavy panes of glass. It tinkled inward. The fear leaped up in her, hot and strong, making a coppery taste in her mouth.

'We can still run,' she said, almost to herself.

He looked down at her and there was no contempt in his glance - only an honesty and a fear that was as great as her own. 'You go if you have to,' he said.