'Salem's Lot(34)

Grunting, they staggered out to the truck and heaved it onto the hydraulic lifter with identical cries of relief. Royal stood back while Hank operated the lift. When it was even with the truck body, they climbed up and walked it inside.

There was something about the box he didn't like. It was more than the lack of customs stamp. An indefinable something. He looked at it until Hank ran down the back gate.

'Come on,' he said. 'Let's get the rest of them.'

The other boxes had regulation customs stamps, except for three that had been shipped here from inside the United States. As they loaded each box onto the truck, Royal checked it off on the invoice form and initialed it. They stacked all of the boxes bound for the new store near the back gate of the truck, away from the sideboard.

'Now, who in the name of God is going to buy all this stuff?' Royal asked when they had finished. 'A Polish rocking chair, a German clock, a spinning wheel from Ireland . . . Christ Almighty, I bet they charge a frigging fortune.'

'Tourists,' Hank said wisely. 'Tourists'll buy anything. Some of those people from Boston and New York they'd buy a bag of cowshit if it was an old bag.'

'I don't like that big box, neither,' Royal said. 'No customs stamp, that's a hell of a funny thing.'

'Well, let's get it where it's going.'

They drove back to 'salem's Lot without speaking, Hank driving heavy on the gas. This was one errand he wanted done. He didn't like it. As Royal had said, it was damn peculiar.

He drove around to the back of the new store, and the back door was unlocked, as Larry had said it would be. Royal tried the lightswitch just inside with no result.

'That's nice,' he grumbled. 'We get to unload this stuff in the goddamn dark . . . say, does it smell a little funny in here to you?'

Hank sniffed. Yes, there was an odor, an unpleasant one, but he could not have said exactly what it reminded him of. It was dry and acrid in the nostrils, like a whiff of old corruption.

'It's just been shut up too Ion ' he said, shining his flashlight around the long, empty room. 'Needs a good airing out.'

'Or a good burning down,' Royal said. He didn't like it. Something about the place put his back up. 'Come on. And let's try not to break our legs.'

They unloaded the boxes as quickly as they could, putting each one down carefully. A half an hour later, Royal closed the back door with a sigh of relief and snapped one of the new padlocks on it.

'That's half of it,' he said.

'The easy half,' Hank answered. He looked up toward the Marsten House, which was dark and shuttered tonight. 'I don't like goin' up there, and I ain't afraid to say so. If there was ever a haunted house, that's it. Those guys must be crazy, tryin' to live there. Probably queer for each other anyway.'

'Like those fag interior decorators,' Royal agreed. 'Prob?ably trying to turn it into a showplace. Good for business.'

'Well, if we got to do it, let's get with it.'

They spared a last look for the crated sideboard leaning against the side of the U-Haul and then Hank pulled the back door down with a bang. He got in behind the wheel and they drove up Jointner Avenue onto the Brooks Road.

A minute later the Marsten House loomed ahead of them, dark and crepitating, and Royal felt the first thread of real fear worm its way into his belly.

'Lordy, that's a creepy place,' Hank murmured. 'Who'd want to live there?'

'I don't know. You see any lights on behind those shutters?'

'No.'

The house seemed to lean toward them, as if awaiting their arrival, Hank wheeled the truck up the driveway and around to the back. Neither of them looked too closely at what the bouncing headlights might reveal in the rank grass of the back yard. Hank felt a strain of fear enter his heart that he had not even felt in Nam, although he had been scared most of his time there. That was a rational fear. Fear that you might step on a pongee stick and see your foot swell up like some noxious green balloon, fear that some kid in black p.j.'s whose name you couldn't even fit in your mouth might blow your head off with a Russian rifle, fear that you might draw a Crazy Jake on patrol that might want you to blow up everyone in a village where the Cong had been a week before. But this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house - boards and hinges and nails and sills. There was no reason, really no reason, to feel that each splintered crack was exhaling its own chalky aroma of evil. That was just plain stupid thinking. Ghosts? He didn't believe in ghosts. Not after Nam.

He had to fumble twice for reverse, and then backed the truck jerkily up to the bulkhead leading to the cellar. The rusted doors stood open, and in the red glow of the truck's taillights, the shallow stone steps seemed to lead down into hell.

'Man ', I don't dig this at all,' Hank said. He tried to smile and it became a grimace.

'Me either.'

They looked at each other in the wan dash lights, the fear heavy on both of them. But childhood was beyond them, and they were incapable of going back with the job undone because of irrational fear - how would they explain it in bright daylight? The job had to be done.

Hank killed the engine and they got out and walked around to the back of the truck. Royal climbed up, released the door catch, and thrust the door up on its tracks.