'Salem's Lot

Eva Miller telephones Susan from the boardinghouse and tells her Floyd Tibbits has just beaten Ben up. At the hospital, Susan sees Ben’s unconscious face and wishes he would finish his book quickly so that he can get out of the Lot and take her with him. Ben regains consciousness long enough to tell Susan to see Matt and find out whether Matt knows Father Callahan.

Susan goes to Matt, who promises to tell her what he and Ben have been up to, but first he asks whether Susan has been to Straker and Barlow’s antiques shop and what she thinks of it, specifically of Straker himself.

Susan had found him sexually attractive in a sophisticated-older-man kind of way, but she did not really like him. She had detected a layer of contempt and cruelty under the surface. He charmed all the ladies in the town. Susan’s mother was completely taken by him. Susan thinks how ironic that is, considering her mother’s dislike of Ben.

Matt gives Susan the whole story about Mike Ryerson. Susan agrees that there is something funny going on, but it obviously is not what Matt thinks. She suggests a couple of rational explanations. None of her theories explain how Mike wound up dead.

She tells Matt about Ben’s childhood experience in the Marsten House. In her opinion, Ben, a highly imaginative child, traumatized himself in the house, and he just happens to have come back to ’salem’s Lot at a bad time. The coincidences of Ralphie and Danny Glick and the Marsten being reoccupied have triggered his imagination. He and Matt should get out of town for a while.

Matt hears a sound upstairs; someone is in the guest bedroom. He goes upstairs to investigate. He opens the door of the spare bedroom and sees Mike lying on the bed just as he was the night before. Mike sits up and tries to hypnotize Matt with his gaze. Matt raises the crucifix in his hand. The vampire recoils, and Matt forces him back and out through the open window. Just before vampire Mike escapes, he says, “I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher” (317).

The shock and fear are too much, and Matt has a heart attack. Susan calls Doctor Cody, then stays with Matt to await the ambulance. She had completely disbelieved Matt and Ben’s explanation for their experiences. Then she had heard Mike’s inhuman voice upstairs. At this moment, she believes it all—and the phone falls from her numb fingers.

The narrator explores the town, its false fronts, its secrets, its familiarity and intimacy, the way the land owns the people, and the people own the land. The narrator tells the secrets the people themselves do not know—the murders, the arsons, the private shames, obsessions and addictions that riddle the people. The town is dead, the narrator tells us, and that is why the coming of evil seems almost preordained, as if the town knew it was coming.

Things are happening in the Lot. Danny Glick slips into the McDougal trailer and kills baby Randy. Margie Glick collapses in her living room and tells her husband she dreams that Danny comes to her every night. She cannot stand the sunlight. It burns her and makes her feel faint.

Floyd is in jail after his attack on Ben the previous day. Deputy Nolly finds him sound asleep and cannot wake him. He is not breathing. Constable Gillespie sees the body and recognizes Floyd’s condition as the same as that of Mike Ryerson—Mike whose body is missing, as is the coroner who performed the autopsy and then died. Dud Rogers, the dump manager, is missing too.

Floyd Tibbits’s attack changes all Matt and Ben’s plans. It prevents the vampire hunters from going to check out the Marsten House.

Matt is in the hospital, recovering well from his heart attack, and Ben is awake when Susan comes to see him. Susan still cannot believe in vampires. “Can’t” is the problem, Ben tells her: If she takes away the fact that vampires cannot exist, then nothing else explains all the facts. Later that night, Susan telephones Ben to tell him that Floyd Tibbits is dead. She tells him about all the other deaths and disappearances. Ben asks her if there is any way she can get her hands on a crucifix.

Mark Petrie awakens to the sound of scratching at his second-floor window. He rolls over to see Danny Glick staring at him through the glass and whispering for Mark to let him in. As Mark struggles against the hypnotic lure of the vampire, his eyes fall on his model monster display, and he snatches up a graveyard monument in the shape of a cross.

Mark sweeps up the cross, holds it up between himself and Danny, and invites Danny in. Danny opens the window and slithers in. Mark swipes the cross across Danny’s cheek. The vampire boy screams as smoke erupts from his flesh. Danny throws himself back out the window, seems to turn to smoke, and disappears. For a moment, the cross burns with a fierce light in Mark’s hand; then it goes dark.