Salem's Lot

5

It was two minutes of seven when the big orange-and-white truck with ‘Henry’s U-Haul’ printed on the sides and back pulled up to the corrugated-steel shack at the end of Custom House Wharf at the Portland docks. The tide was on the turn and the gulls were restless with it, wheeling and crying overhead against the sunset crimson sky.

‘Christ, there’s nobody here,’ Royal Snow said, swigging the last of his Pepsi and dropping the empty to the floor of the cab. ‘We’ll get arrested for burglars.’

‘There’s somebody,’ Hank Peters said. ‘Cop.’

It wasn’t precisely a cop; it was a night watchman. He shone his light in at them. ‘Either of you guys Lawrence Crewcut?’

‘Crockett,’ Royal said. ‘We’re from him. Come to pick up some boxes.’

‘Good,’ the night watchman said. ‘Come on in the office. I got an invoice for you to sign.’ He gestured to Peters, who was behind the wheel. ‘Back up right over there. Those double doors with the light burning. See?’

‘Yeah.’ He put the truck in reverse.

Royal Snow followed the night watchman into the office where a coffee maker was burbling. The clock over the pin-up calendar said 7:04. The night watchman scrabbled through some papers on the desk and came up with a clipboard. ‘Sign there.’

Royal signed his name.

‘You want to watch out when you go in there. Turn on the lights. There’s rats.’

‘I’ve never seen a rat that wouldn’t run from one of these,’ Royal said, and swung his work-booted foot in an arc.

‘These are wharf rats, sonny,’ the watchman said dryly. ‘They’ve run off with bigger men than you.’

Royal went back out and walked over to the warehouse door. The night watchman stood in the doorway of the shack, watching him, ‘Look out,’ Royal said to Peters. ‘The old guy said there was rats.’

‘Okay.’ He sniggered. ‘Good ole Larry Crewcut.’

Royal found the light switch inside the door and turned them on. There was something about the atmosphere, heavy with the mixed aromas of salt and wood rot and wetness, that stifled hilarity. That, and the thought of rats.

The boxes were stacked in the middle of the wide warehouse floor. The place was otherwise empty, and the collection looked a little portentous as a result. The sideboard was in the center, taller than the others, and the only one not stamped ‘Barlow and Straker, 27 Jointner Avenue, Jer. Lot, Maine.’

‘Well, this don’t look too bad,’ Royal said. He consulted his copy of the invoice and then counted boxes. ‘Yeah, they’re all here.’

‘There are rats,’ Hank said. ‘Hear ‘em?’

‘Yeah, miserable things. I hate ‘em.’

They both fell silent for a moment, listening to the squeak and patter coming from the shadows.

‘Well, let’s get with it,’ Royal said. ‘Let’s put that big baby on first so it won’t be in the way when we get to the store.’

‘Okay.’

They walked over to the box, and Royal took out his pocket knife. With one quick gesture he had slit the brown invoice envelope taped to the side.

‘Hey Hank said. ‘Do you think we ought to-’

‘We gotta make sure we got the right thing, don’t we? If we screw up, Larry’ll tack our asses to his bulletin board.’ He pulled the invoice out and looked at it.

‘What’s it say?’ Hank asked.

‘Heroin,’ Royal said judiciously. ‘Two hundred pounds of the shit. Also two thousand girlie books from Sweden, three hundred gross of French ticklers-’

‘Gimme that.’ Hank snatched it away. ‘Sideboard,’ he said. ‘Just like Larry told us. From London, England. Portland, Maine, POE. French ticklers, my ass. Put this back.’

Royal did. ‘Something funny about this,’ he said.

‘Yeah, you. Funny like the Italian Army.’

‘No, no shit. There’s no customs stamp on this fucker. Not on the box, not on the invoice envelope, not on the invoice. No stamp.’

‘They probably do ‘em in that ink that only shows up under a special black light.’

‘They never did when I was on the docks. Christ, they stamped cargo ninety ways for Sunday. You couldn’t grab a box without getting blue ink up to your elbows.’

‘Good. I’m very glad. But my wife happens to go to bed very early and I had hopes of getting some tonight.’

‘Maybe if we took a look inside-’

‘No way. Come on. Grab it.’

Royal shrugged. They tipped the box, and something shifted heavily inside. The box was a bitch to lift. It could be one of those fancy dressers, all right. It was heavy enough.

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. ‘Probably 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.

The box sat there, sawdust still clinging to it, squat and mute.

‘God, I don’t want to take that down there!’ Hank Peters choked out, and his voice was almost a sob.

‘Come on up,’ Royal said. ‘Let’s get rid of it.’

They dragged the box onto the lift and let it down with a hiss of escaping air. When it was at waist level, Hank let go of the lever and they gripped it.

‘Easy,’ Royal grunted, backing toward the steps. ‘Easy does it… easy… ’ In the red glow of the taillights his face was constricted and corded like the face of a man having a heart attack.

He backed down the stairs one at a time, and as the box tilted up against his chest, he felt its dreadful weight settle against him like a slab of stone. It was heavy, he would think later, but not that heavy. He and Hank had muscled bigger loads for Larry Crockett, both upstairs and down, but there was something about the atmosphere of this place that took the heart out of you and made you no good.

The steps were slimy-slick and twice he tottered on the precarious edge of balance, crying out miserably, ‘Hey! For Christ’s sake! Watch it!’

And then they were down. The ceiling was low above them and they carried the sideboard bent over like hags.

‘Set it here" Hank gasped. ‘I can’t carry it no further!’

They set it down with a thump and stepped away. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw that fear had been changed to near terror by some secret alchemy. The cellar seemed suddenly filled with secret rustling noises. Rats, perhaps, or perhaps something that didn’t even bear thinking of.

They bolted, Hank first and Royal Snow right behind him. They ran up the cellar steps and Royal slammed the bulkhead doors with backward sweeps of his arm.

They clambered into the cab of the U-Haul and Hank started it up and put it in gear. Royal grabbed his arm, and in the darkness his face seemed to be all eyes, huge and staring.

‘Hank, we never put on those locks.’

They both stared at the bundle of new padlocks on the truck’s dashboard, held together by a twist of baling wire. Hank grabbed at his jacket pocket and brought out a key ring with five new Yale keys on it, one which would fit the lock on the back door of the shop in town, four for out here. Each was neatly labeled.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘Look, if we come back early tomorrow morning-’

Royal unclamped the flashlight under the dashboard. ‘That won’t work,’ he said, ‘and you know it.’

They got out of the cab, feeling the cool evening breeze strike the sweat on their foreheads. ‘Go do the back door,’ Royal said. ‘I’ll get the front door and the shed.’

They separated. Hank went to the back door, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He had to fumble twice to thread the locking arm through the hasp. This close to the house, the smell of age and wood rot was palpable. All those stories about Hubie Marsten that they had laughed about as kids began to recur, and the chant they had chased the girls with: Watch out, watch out, watch out! Hubie’ll get you if you don’t. watch… OUT -

‘Hank?’

He drew in breath sharply, and the other lock dropped out of his hands. He picked it up. ‘You oughtta know better than to creep up on a person like that, Did you…?’

‘Yeah. Hank, who’s gonna go down in that cellar again and put the key ring on the table?’

‘I dunno,’ Hank Peters said. ‘I dunno.’

‘Think we better flip for it?’

‘Yeah, I guess that’s best.’

Royal took out a quarter. ‘Call it in the air.’ He flicked it.

‘Heads.’

Royal caught it, slapped it on his forearm, and exposed it. The eagle gleamed at them dully.

‘Jesus,’ Hank said miserably. But he took the key ring and the flashlight and opened the bulkhead doors again.

He forced his legs to carry him down the steps, and when he had cleared the roof overhang he shone his light across the visible cellar, which took an L-turn thirty feet further up and went off God knew where. The flashlight beam picked out the table, with a dusty checked tablecloth on it. A rat sat on the table, a huge one, and it did not move when the beam of light struck it. It sat up on its plump haunches and almost seemed to grin.

He walked past the box toward the table. ‘Hsst! Rat!’

The rat jumped down and trotted off toward the elbow-bend further up. Hank’s hand was trembling now, and the flashlight beam slipped jerkily from place to place, now picking out a dusty barrel, now a decades-old bureau that had been loaded down here, now a stack of old newspapers, now -

He jerked the flashlight beam back toward the newspapers and sucked in breath as the light fell on something to the left side of them.

A shirt… was that a shirt? Bundled up like an old rag. Something behind it that might have been blue jeans. And something that looked like…

Something snapped behind him.

He panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away, shambling into a run. As he passed the box, he saw what had made the noise. One of the aluminum bands had let go, and now pointed jaggedly toward the low roof, like a finger.

He stumbled up the stairs, slammed the bulkhead behind him (his whole body had crawled into goose flesh; he would not be aware of it until later), snapped the lock on the catch, and ran to the cab of the truck. He was breathing in small, whistling gasps like a hurt dog. He dimly heard Royal asking him what had happened, what was going on down there, and then he threw the truck into drive and screamed out, roaring around the corner of the house on two wheels, digging at the soft earth. He did not slow down until the truck was back on the Brooks Road, speeding toward Lawrence Crockett’s office in town. And then he began to shake so badly he was afraid he would have to pull over.

‘What was down there?’ Royal asked. ‘What did you see?’

‘Nothin’,’ Hank Peters said, and the word came out in sections divided by his clicking teeth. ‘I didn’t see nothin’ and I never want to see it again.’