'Salem's Lot(28)

'Give him my best,' Dell said, stowing his paper back under the bar - Exhibit A for later in the evening. 'Awful sorry to hear about it.'

Floyd paused halfway to the door and spoke, seemingly to the air. 'Hung him up on the spikes, did they? By Christ, I'd like to get hold of the kids who did that.'

'Devil worshipers,' Dell said. 'Wouldn't surprise me a bit. I don't know what's got into people these days.'

Floyd left. The Bryant kid put another dime in the juke, and Dick Curless began to sing 'Bury the Bottle with Me.'

18

7:30 P.M.

'You be home early,' Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. 'School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.'

Danny shuffled his feet. 'I don't see why I have to take him at all.'

'You don't,' Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. 'You can always stay home.'

She turned back to the counter, where she was freshen?ing fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.

'We'll be back,' he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.

'By nine.'

'Okay, okay.'

In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. 'Where are you going, boys?'

'Over to see that new kid,' Danny said. 'Mark Petrie.' 'Yeah,' Ralphie said. 'We're gonna look at his electric trains.'

Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. 'Be home early,' he said absently.

Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the back yard Danny said, 'I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.'

'I'll tell,' Ralphie said smugly. 'I'll tell why you really wanted to go.'

'You creep,' Danny said hopelessly.

At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie's on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a short cut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.

Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters - wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doc?tor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny's brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.

'You're putrid, you know that?' Danny said.

'I know,' Ralphie said proudly. 'What's putrid?'

'It's when you get green and squishy, like boogers.'

'Get bent,' Ralphie said. They were going down the bank of Crockett Brook, which gurgled leisurely over its gravel bed, holding a faint pearliness on its surface. Two miles east it joined Taggart Stream, which in turn joined the Royal River.

Danny started across the stepping stones, squinting in the gathering gloom to see his footing.

'I'm gonna pushya!' Ralphie cried gleefully behind him. 'Look out, Danny, I'm gonna pushya!'

'You push me and I'll push you in the quicksand, ring?meat,' Danny said.

They reached the other bank. 'There ain't no quicksand around here, Ralphie scoffed, moving closer to his brother nevertheless.

'Yeah?' Danny said ominously. 'A kid got killed in the? quicksand just a few years ago. I heard those old dudes that hang around the store talkin' about it.'

'Really?' Ralphie asked. His eyes were wide.

'Yeah,' Danny said. 'He went down screamin' and hol?lerin' and his mouth filled up with quicksand and that was it. Raaaacccccchhhh.'

'C'mon,' Ralphie said uneasily. It was close to full dark now, and the woods were full of moving shadows. 'Let's get out of here.'

They started up the other bank, slipping a little in the pine needles. The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a ten-year-old named Jerry Kingfield. He might have gone down in the quicksand screaming and hollering, but if he had, no one had heard him. He had simply disappeared in the Marshes six years ago while fishing. Some people thought quicksand, others held that a sex preevert had killed him. There were preeverts everywhere.

'They say his ghost still haunts these woods,' Danny said solemnly, neglecting to tell his little brother that the Marshes were three miles south.

'Don't, Danny,' Ralphie said uneasily. 'Not . . . not in the dark.'

The woods creaked secretively around them. The whip?poorwill had ceased his cry. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. The daylight was nearly gone from the sky.

'Every now and then,' Danny went on eerily, 'when some ringmeat little kid comes out after dark, it comes flapping out of the trees, the face all putrid and covered with quicksand - '

'Danny, come on.'

His little brother's voice held real pleading, and Danny stopped. He had almost scared himself. The trees were dark, bulking presences all around them, moving slowly in the night breeze, rubbing together, creaking in their joints.