Salem's Lot

12

Something had awakened him.

He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling.

A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent.

There it was again. Scratching.

Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral.

Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown hideously long and sharp.

‘Let me in,’ the voice whispered, and Mark was not sure if the words had crossed dark air or were only in his mind.

He became aware that he was frightened-his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened, not even when he got tired swimming back from the float at Popham Beach and thought he was going to drown. His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.

‘Let me in, Mark. I want to play with you.’

There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold onto; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspended in space… or perhaps it was clinging to the outside shingles like some dark insect.

‘Mark… I finally came, Mark. Please… ’

Of course. You have to invite them inside. He knew that from his monster magazines, the ones his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way.

He got out of bed and almost fell down. It was only then that he realized fright was too mild a word for this. Even terror did not express what he felt. The pallid face outside the window tried to smile, but it had lain in darkness too long to remember precisely how. What Mark saw was a twitching grimace-a bloody mask tragedy.

Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn’t so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren’t so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, ‘C’mon in, Danny,’ and then you wouldn’t be afraid at all because you’d be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with him. You’d be -

No! That’s how they get you!

He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.

‘Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!’

Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy’s face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.

Think of something. Quick! Quick!

‘The rain,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.’

Danny Glick hissed at him.

‘Mark! Open the window!’

‘Betty Bitter bought some butter-’

‘The window, Mark, he commands it!’

‘-but, says Betty, this butter’s bitter.’

He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark’s eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model monsters, now so bland and foolish -

His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.

The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic graveyard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.

With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult-his father, for instance-and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: ‘Come on in, then.’

The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark’s shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.

Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick’s cheek.

His scream was horrible, unearthly… and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing’s mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.

And then it was over, as if it had never happened.

But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.

Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents’ bedroom and his father’s voice: ‘What in hell was that?’