'Salem's Lot(15)

'Home cooking?'

'The homiest.'

'I'd love it. I've been living on TV dinners since I moved in.'

'Six o'clock? We eat early in Sticksville.'

'Sure. Fine. And speaking of home, I better get you there. Come on.'

They didn't speak on the ride back until she could see the night light twinkling on top of the hill, the one her mother always left on when she was out.

'I wonder who's up there tonight?' she asked, looking toward the Marsten House.

'The new owner, probably,' he said noncommittally.

'It didn't look like electricity, that light,' she mused. 'Too yellow, too faint. Kerosene lamp, maybe.'

'They probably haven't had a chance to have the power turned on yet.'

'Maybe. But almost anyone with a little foresight would call up the power company before they moved in.' He didn't reply. They had come to her driveway.

'Ben,' she said suddenly, 'is your new book about the Marsten House?'

He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. 'It's late.'

She smiled at him. 'I don't mean to snoop.'

'It's all right. But maybe another time . . . in daylight.'

'Okay.'

'You better get in, girly. Six tomorrow?'

She looked at her watch. 'Six today.'

'Night, Susan.'

'Night.'

She got out and ran lightly up the path to the side door, then turned and waved as he drove away. Before she went in, she added sour cream to the milkman's order. With baked potatoes, that would add a little class to supper.

She paused a minute longer before going in, looking up at the Marsten House.

8

In his small, boxlike room he undressed with the light off and crawled into bed naked. She was a nice girl, the first nice one since Miranda had died. He hoped he wasn't trying to turn her into a new Miranda; that would be painful for him and horribly unfair to her.

He lay down and let himself drift. Shortly before sleep took him, he hooked himself up on one elbow, looked past the square shadow of his typewriter and the thin sheaf of manuscript beside it, and out the window. He had asked Eva Miller specifically for this room after looking at sev?eral, because it faced the Marsten House directly.

The lights up there were still on.

That night he had the old dream for the first time since he had come to Jerusalem's Lot, and it had not come with such vividness since those terrible maroon days following Miranda's death in the motorcycle accident. The run up the hallway, the horrible scream of the door as he pulled it open, the dangling figure suddenly opening its hideous puffed eyes, himself turning to the door in the slow, sludgy panic of dreams  -

And finding it locked.

Chapter Three THE LOT (I)

1

The town is not slow to wake - chores won't wait. Even while the edge of the sun lies below the horizon and darkness is on the land, activity has begun.

2

4:00 A.M.

The Griffen boys - Hal, eighteen, and Jack, fourteen and the two hired hands had begun the milking. The barn was a marvel of cleanliness, whitewashed and gleaming. Down the center, between the spotless runways which fronted the stalls on both sides, a cement drinking trough ran. Hal turned on the water at the far end by flicking a switch and opening a valve. The electric pump that pulled water up from one of the two artesian wells that served the place hummed into smooth operation. He was a sullen boy, not bright, and especially irked on this day. He and his father had had it out the night before. Hal wanted to quit school. He hated school. He hated its boredom, its insistence that you sit still for great fifty-minute chunks of time, and he hated all his subjects with the exceptions of Woodshop and Graphic Arts. English was maddening, history was stupid, business math was incomprehensible. And none of it mattered, that was the hell of it. Cows didn't care if you said ain't or mixed your tenses, they didn't care who was the Commander in Chief of the god?damn Army of the Potomac during the goddamn Civil War, and as for math, his own for chrissakes father couldn't add two fifths and one half if it meant the firing squad. That's why he had an accountant. And look at that guy! College-educated and still working for a dummy like his old man, His father had told him many times that book learning wasn't the secret of running a successful business (and dairy farming was a business like any other); knowing people was the secret of that, His father was a great one to sling all that bullshit about the wonders of education, him and his sixth-grade education. He never read anything but Reader's Digest and the farm was making $16,000 a year. Know people. Be able to shake their hands and ask after their wives by name. Well, Hal knew people. There were two kinds: those you could push around and those you couldn't. The former outnumbered the latter ten to one.

Unfortunately, his father was a one.

He looked over his shoulder at Jack, who was forking hay slowly and dreamily into the first four stalls from a broken bale. There was the bookworm, Daddy's pet. The miserable little shit.

'Come on!' He shouted. 'Fork that hay!'

He opened the storage lockers and pulled out the first of their four milking machines. He trundled it down the aisle, frowning fiercely over the glittering stainless-steel top.

School. Fucking for chrissakes school.

The next nine months stretched ahead of him like an endless tomb.