Salem's Lot

13

3:00 P.M.

Bonnie Sawyer was lying on the big double bed in her house on the Deep Cut Road. It was a regular house, no shanty trailer, and it had a foundation and a cellar. Her husband, Reg, made good money as a car mechanic at Jim Smith’s Pontiac in Buxton.

She was naked except for a pair of filmy blue panties, and she looked impatiently over at the clock on the nightstand: 3:02-where was he?

Almost as if the thought had summoned him, the bedroom door opened the tiniest bit, and Corey Bryant peered through.

‘Is it okay?’ he whispered. Corey was only twenty-two, had been working for the phone company two years, and this affair with a married woman-especially a knockout like Bonnie Sawyer, who had been Miss Cumberland County of 1973-left him feeling weak and nervous and horny.

Bonnie smiled at him with her lovely capped teeth. ‘If it wasn’t, honey,’ she said, ‘you’d have a hole in you big enough to watch TV through.’

He came tiptoeing in, his utility lineman’s belt jingling ridiculously around his waist.

Bonnie giggled and opened her arms. ‘I really like you, Corey. You’re cute.’

Corey’s eyes happened on the dark shadow beneath the taut blue nylon, and began to feel more horny than nervous. He forgot about tiptoeing and came to her, and as they joined, a cicada began to buzz somewhere in the woods.