Salem's Lot

2

Ben Mears was one of the ‘salem’s Lot volunteers who beat the bushes for Ralphie Glick, and he got nothing for his pains other than pants cuffs full of cockleburs and an aggravated case of hay fever brought on by late summer goldenrod.

On the third day of the search he came into the kitchen of Eva’s ready to eat a can of ravioli and then fall into bed for a nap before writing. He found Susan Norton bustling around the kitchen stove and preparing some kind of hamburger casserole. The men just home from work were sitting around the table, pretending to talk, and ogling her-she was wearing a faded check shirt tied at the midriff and cut-off corduroy shorts, Eva Miller was ironing in a private alcove off the kitchen.

‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Cooking you something decent before you fall away to a shadow,’ she said, and Eva snorted laughter from behind the angle of the wall. Ben felt his ears burn.

‘Cooks real good, she does,’ Weasel said. ‘I can tell. I been watchin’.’

‘If you was watchin’ any more, your eyes woulda fell outta their sockets,’ Grover Verrill said, and cackled.

Susan covered the casserole, put it in the oven, and they went out on the back porch to wait for it. The sun was going down red and inflamed.

‘Any luck?’

‘No. Nothing.’ He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one.

‘You smell like you took a bath in Old Woodsman’s,’ she said.

‘Fat lot of good it did.’ He held out his arm and showed her number of puffed insect bites and half-healed scratches. ‘Son of a bitching mosquitoes and goddamn pricker bushes.’

‘What do you think happened to him, Ben?’

‘God knows.’ He exhaled smoke. ‘Maybe somebody crept up behind the older brother, coshed him with a sock full of sand or something, and abducted the kid.’

‘Do you think he’s dead?’

Ben looked at her to see if she wanted an honest answer or merely a hopeful one. He took her hand and locked his fingers through hers. ‘Yes,’ he said briefly. ‘I think the kid is dead. No conclusive proof yet, but I think so.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘I hope you’re wrong. My mom and some of the other ladies have been in to sit with Mrs Glick. She’s out of her mind and so is her husband. And the other boy just wanders around like a ghost.’

‘Um,’ Ben said. He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.

‘… night?’

‘Hmm? Sorry.’ He looked around at her.

‘I said, my dad would like you to come over tomorrow night. Can you?’

‘Will you be there?’

‘Sure, I will,’ she said, and looked at him.

‘All right. Good.’ He wanted to look at her-she was lovely in the sunset light-but his eyes were drawn towards the Marsten House as if by a magnet.

‘It draws you, doesn’t it?’ she said, and the reading of his thought, right down to the metaphor, was nearly uncanny.

‘Yes. It does.’

‘Ben, what’s this new book about’?

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Give it time. I’ll tell you as Soon as I can. It’s… got to work itself out.’

She wanted to say I love you at that precise moment, say it with the ease and lack of self-consciousness with which the thought had risen to the surface of her mind, but she bit the words off behind her lips. She did not want to say it while he was looking… looking up there.

She got up. ‘I’ll check the casserole.’

When she left him, he was smoking and looking up at the Marsten House.