Salem’s Lot Read Free

says this is an awful thing, a dark thing. It is serious for you and the boy. Particularly for the boy. It is eating him up. He says… ’
    Gracon spoke again, briefly.
    ‘He asks if you understand what you have done in this New Jerusalem.’
    ‘Jerusalem’s Lot,’ the tall man said. ‘Yes. I understand.’
    Gracon spoke again.
    ‘He asks what you intend to do about it.’
    The tall man shook his head Very slowly. ‘I don’t know.’
    Gracon spoke again.
    ‘He says he will pray for you.’

6
    A week later he awoke sweating from a nightmare and called out the boy’s name.
    ‘I’m going back,’ he said.
    The boy paled beneath his tan.
    ‘Can you come with me?’ the man asked.
    ‘Do you love me?’
    ‘Yes. God, yes.’
    The boy began to weep, and the tall man held him.

7
    Still, there was no sleep for him. Faces lurked in the shadows, swirling up at him like faces obscured in snow, and when the wind blew an overhanging tree limb against the roof, he jumped.
    Jerusalem’s Lot.
    He closed his eyes and put his arm across them and it all began to come back. He could almost see the glass paperweight, the kind that will make a tiny blizzard when you shake it.
    ‘Salem’s Lot…

Part One: THE MARSTEN HOUSE
    No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
    -Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House

Chapter One
    BEN (I)
    1
 
    By the time he had passed Portland going north on the turnpike, Ben Mears had begun to feel a not unpleasurable tingle of excitement in his belly. It was September 5, 1975, and summer was enjoying her final grand fling. The trees were bursting with green, the sky was a high, soft blue, and just over the Falmouth town line he saw two boys walking a road parallel to the expressway with fishing rods settled on their shoulders like carbines.
    He switched to the travel lane, stowed to the minimum turnpike speed, and began to look for anything that would jog his memory. There was nothing at first, and he tried to caution himself against almost sure disappointment. You were seven then. That’s twenty-five years of water under the bridge. Places change. Like people.
    In those days the four-lane 295 hadn’t existed. If you wanted to go to Portland from the Lot, you went out Route 12 to Falmouth and then got on Number 1. Time had marched on.
    Stop that shit.
    But it was hard to stop. It was hard to stop when -
    A big BSA cycle with jacked handlebars suddenly roared past him in the passing lane, a kid in a T-shirt driving, a girl in a red cloth jacket and huge mirror-lensed sunglasses riding pillion behind him. They cut in a little too quickly and he overreacted, jamming on his brakes and laying both hands on the horn. The BSA sped up, belching blue smoke from its exhaust, and the girl jabbed her middle finger back at him.
    He resumed speed, wishing for a cigarette. His hands were trembling slightly. The BSA was almost out of sight now, moving fast. The kids. The goddamned kids. Memories tried to crowd in on him, memories of a more recent vintage. He pushed them away. He hadn’t been on a motorcycle in two years. He planned never to ride on one again.
    A flash of red caught his eye off to the left, and when, he glanced that way, he felt a burst of pleasure and recognition. A large red barn stood on a hill far across a rising field of timothy and clover, a barn with a cupola painted white - even at this distance he could see the sungleam on the weather vane atop that cupola. It had been there then, and was still here now. It looked exactly the same. Maybe