'Salem's Lot(14)

'I let out a scream that probably could have been heard for two miles. And then I ran. I fell halfway downstairs, got up, and ran out the front door and straight down the road. The kids were waiting for me about half a mile down. That's when I noticed I still had the glass snow globe in my hand. And I've still got it.'

'You don't really think you saw Hubert Marsten, do you, Ben?' Far up ahead she could see the yellow blinking light that signaled the center of town and was glad for it.

After a long pause, he said, 'I don't know.' He said it with difficulty and reluctance, as if he would have rather said no and closed the subject thereby. 'Probably I was so keyed up that I hallucinated the whole thing. On the other hand, there may be some truth in that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of . . . dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of An imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge, and cause it to produce an active manifestation of . . . of something. I'm not talking about ghosts, precisely. I'm talking about a kind of psychic television in three dimensions. Perhaps even something alive. A monster, if you like.'

She took one of his cigarettes and lit it.

'Anyway, I slept with the light on in my bedroom for weeks after, and I've dreamed about opening that door off and on for the rest of my life. Whenever I'm in stress, the dream comes.'

'That's terrible.'

'No, it's not,' he said. 'Not very, anyway. We all have our bad dreams.' He gestured with a thumb at the silent, sleeping houses they were passing on Jointner Avenue. 'Sometimes I wonder that the very boards of those houses don't cry out with the awful things that happen in dreams.' He paused. 'Come on down to Eva's and sit on the porch for a while, if you like. I can't invite you in - rules of the house - but I've got a couple of Cokes in the icebox and some Bacardi in my room, if you'd like a nightcap.'

'I'd like one very much.'

He turned onto Railroad Street, popped off the head?lights, and turned into the small dirt parking lot which served the rooming house. The back porch was painted white with red trim, and the three wicker chairs lined up on it looked toward the Royal River. The river itself was a dazzling dream. There was a late summer moon caught in the trees on the river's far bank, three-quarters full, and it had painted a silver path across the water. With the town silent, she could hear the faint foaming sound as water spilled down the sluiceways of the dam.

'Sit down. I'll be back.'

He went in, closing the screen door softly behind him, and she sat down in one of the rockers.

She liked him in spite of his strangeness. She was not a believer in love at first sight, although she did believe that instant lust (going under the more innocent name of infatuation) occurred frequently. And yet he wasn't a man that would ordinarily encourage midnight entries in a locked diary; he was too thin for his height, a little pale. His face was introspective and bookish, and his eyes rarely gave away the train of his thoughts. All this topped with a heavy pelt of black hair that looked as if it had been raked with the fingers rather than brushed.

And that story  -

Neither Conway's Daughter nor Air Dance hinted at such a morbid turn of mind. The former was about a minister's daughter who runs away, joins the countercul?ture, and takes a long, rambling journey across the country by thumb. The latter was the story of Frank Buzzey, an escaped convict who begins a new life as a car mechanic in another state, and his eventual recapture. Both of them were bright, energetic books, and Hubie Marsten's dangling shadow, mirrored in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, did not seem to lie over either of them.

As if by the very suggestion, she found her eyes dragged away from the river and up to the left of the porch, where the last hill before town blotted out the stars.

'Here,' he said. 'I hope these'll be all right.

'Look at the Marsten House,' she said.

He did. There was a light on up there.

7

The drinks were gone and midnight passed; the moon was nearly out of sight. They had made some light conver?sation, and then she said into a pause:

'I like you, Ben. Very much.'

'I like you, too. And I'm surprised . . . no, I don 't mean it that way. Do you remember that stupid crack I made in the park? This all seems too fortuitous.'

'I want to see you again, if you want to see me.'

'I do.'

'But go slow, Remember, I'm just a small-town girl.'

He smiled. 'It seems so Hollywood. But Hollywood good. Am I supposed to kiss you now?'

'Yes,' she said seriously, 'I think that comes next.'

He was sitting in the rocker next to her, and without stopping its slow movement forth and back, he leaned over and pressed his mouth on hers, with no attempt to draw her tongue or to touch her. His lips were firm with the pressure of his square teeth, and there was a faint taste-?odor of rum and tobacco.

She began to rock also, and the movement made the kiss into something new. It waxed and waned, light and then firm. She thought: He's tasting me. The thought wakened a secret, clean excitement in her, and she broke the kiss before it could take her further.

'Wow,' he said.

'Would you like to come to dinner at my house tomorrow night?' she asked. 'My folks would love to meet you, I bet.' In the pleasure and serenity of this moment, she could throw that sop to her mother.