Salem's Lot

19

9:00 P.M.

Mabel Werts was a hugely fat woman, seventy-four on her last birthday, and her legs had become less and less reliable. She was a repository of town history and town gossip, and her memory stretched back over five decades of necrology, adultery, thievery, and insanity. She was a gossip but not a deliberately cruel one (although those whose stories she had spied on their back fence way might tend to disagree); she simply lived in and for the town. In a way she was the town, a fat widow who now went out very little, and who spent most of her time by her window dressed in a tentlike silk camisole, her yellowish-ivory hair done up in a coronet of thick, braided cables, with the telephone on her right hand and her high-powered Japanese binoculars on the left. The combination of the two-plus the time to use them fully-made her a benevolent spider sitting in the center of a communications web that stretched from the Bend to east ‘salem.

She had been watching the Marsten House for want of something better to watch when the shutters to the left of the porch were opened, letting out a golden square of light that was definitely not the steady glow of electricity. She had gotten just a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been a man’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the light. It gave her a queer thrill.

There had been no more movement from the house she thought: Now, what kind of people is it that only opens up when a body can’t catch a decent glimpse of them?

She put the glasses down and carefully picked up the telephone. Two voices - she quickly identified them as Harriet Durham and Glynis Mayberry-were talking about the Ryerson boy finding Irwin Purinton’s dog.

She sat quietly, breathing through her mouth, so as to give no sign of her presence on the line.