'Salem's Lot

By Monday morning, ’salem’s Lot is dead; the town just doesn’t know it yet. Many of its residents are rising and going to work as usual, unaware that so many others are asleep in old freezers, haylofts, in basements and under houses. Some are wondering where their loved ones have gone, but they are too weak and sick to inquire very deeply.

At 11:00 p.m. Sunday night, Susan’s parents call Sheriff McCaslin because Susan never came home. He promises to keep an eye out for her. Cruising the back roads, he spots her car and investigates. He hears a light and carefree woman’s voice say, “Sheriff?” He sees a breathtakingly beautiful Susan walking hand in hand with Barlow, who now looks like a young man. They fall on him, and Monday morning, he is curled in the trunk of his cruiser, asleep but not breathing. Before dawn, Susan also visits her mother.

Ben comes downstairs late Monday morning to find Mark Petrie waiting for him. Mark reminds Ben of himself at the same age, but he also feels a stretching of reality, a weight settling on him as if they are the same person. Mark feels the same thing. He introduces himself to Ben and tells him about Susan being taken by Barlow. Ben is shocked and speechless. He has a flashback to the motorcycle accident where his wife, Miranda, died, and Miranda becomes Susan in the darkness of his mind.

When Ben recovers his composure, he and Mike go for a drive, and Mike tells his part of the story, finishing with his and Susan’s visit to the Barlow house and Susan coming to his window. Afterward they go to see Matt Burke at the hospital. They find Jimmy Cody in Matt’s room. Matt has worked out most of the details of what has been happening in the town and some of Barlow’s history. He also fills the men on what they must do to destroy the vampires and prevent them from rising again. Ben, as the one who has been hurt most personally by Barlow, is the one who must stake Barlow and then Susan.

They stop at the church for Father Callahan to hear their confessions. Ben feels the power of the church beating on him. At the same time, the ritual feels medieval and somehow “accursed.” Its primitiveness makes the idea of vampires feel all the more real to him. He experiences a vision of the church as a beacon of light against an outer darkness full of werewolves, incubi, and witches and his own life as a “spark in an edifice which, if seen clearly, might drive all men mad.” (499)

Arriving at the Marsten House, the vampire hunters approach the front door, and Callahan strikes it with the cross. There’s a flash of light, and the padlock on the door falls off, melted. Callahan leads the way into the house. They find Straker upstairs, hanging upside down from an overhead beam, dead and bloodless. Barlow punished him for allowing Mark to escape. They go to the cellar next. They find an envelope lying on a table. In the envelope is a letter written by Barlow, telling them he has taken other quarters for the day, but he has no more use for Susan, so he has left her for them. He tells Mark that since Mark robbed him of his faithful servant, Barlow will rob Mark of his parents. He taunts Father Callahan as well, saying that he was ancient before the Catholic Church was ever conceived, and he will defeat Callahan.

They find Susan on a raised dais. She was always pretty but had never quite achieved beauty—probably because her life had been so safe and ordinary. Now she is breathtakingly beautiful, but it is a cold and distant beauty. Ben lays the point of the stake over her heart and hammers it down. When it is done, Ben runs screaming from the cellar.

Father Callahan seals off the cellar with holy water so that Barlow cannot return there. Evening is falling. Mark and Father Callahan go to warn Mark’s parents while Ben and Cody return to Matt Burke’s hospital room. They try to telephone Mark’s house, but the line is out of order.

Mark’s father refuses to believe Mark and Father Callahan, but he agrees to telephone Matt Burke at the hospital, then go in person to talk everyone out of their delusions. When he tries to telephone, however, he finds the phone out of order. Then the lights go out.

Barlow appears and kills Mark’s parents. Then he catches Mark and twists his arm behind him. Callahan finds himself confronting Barlow with his cross upraised and Mark held between them like a shield.

Barlow offers a bargain: If Callahan will throw aside his cross and confront the vampire armed only with faith, Barlow will let Mark go. Callahan doesn’t trust Barlow to do as he promises. Barlow, however, releases Mark and tells Callahan it is time for him to fulfill his side of the bargain. Callahan hesitates. Reason tells him to drive off the vampire, but superstition warns him that if he doesn’t follow through, something terrible will happen. As he hesitates, the glow of the cross in his hand dies. Barlow mocks Callahan for his failure of faith. He plucks the cross from Callahan’s hand, breaks it, and throws it to the floor. He tells Callahan the cross, the bread, the wine, and the holy water are only symbols: Without faith, they are meaningless.

Laying hold of Callahan, Barlow tells him it is time to learn a true religion by taking the vampire’s communion. Barlow forces Callahan to drink his blood.

Sometime later, at the hospital, Matt is asleep when Mark bursts into his room, where Ben and Cody have been keeping watch. He tells them what happened at his house. He breaks down in tears, and Ben holds him.

Meanwhile, Father Callahan stumbles toward the church. He touches the handle of the door and is thrown back by a bolt of blue light. His church has rejected him. He makes his way to the bus station and buys a ticket on the first bus leaving the Lot.

At the hospital, the remaining vampire hunters make plans for the next day. They need to make stakes; then they will hunt from one end of town to the other, destroying every vampire they find, but above all else, they must find Barlow. Mark remembers seeing blue chalk on Barlow’s sleeve, and they think of the Brock Street School, an old building built around the same time as the Marsten House.

With the coming of daylight, the remaining vampire hunters proceed first to Mark’s house. While Ben makes stakes on the lathe in Henry Petrie’s workshop, Cody and Mark locate a number of vampire dens and mark them to come back when they are armed. In one of the houses, Coby sees a pile of children’s toys, including a child-sized pool table, and he suddenly realizes where Barlow got blue chalk on his sleeve. It is pool chalk. There is a pool table in the basement of Ben’s boardinghouse.

Mark and Cody go to check Ben’s boardinghouse for vampires. While Mark is rummaging in the kitchen for a flashlight, Cody goes to investigate the basement. Mark hears a crash and a thump, and then Cody begins to scream. The vampires sawed through the cellar stairs and placed knives blade up on the floor underneath. Cody dies. Alone, Mark returns to Ben at the Petrie house.

They call the hospital, trying to get through to Matt, only to find out that Matt has had a second heart attack and died, leaving Mark and Ben entirely on their own.

Giving up on Gillespie, Mark and Ben go back to the boardinghouse. As Ben climbs down a board into the basement, he sees that his hands are glowing. In the basement, they find a chest-high door set into the wall, locked with a new padlock. Ben takes an axe from a peg on the wall and pours holy water on the blade. The axe begins to glow. Ben begins to feel a sense of sureness and rightness. With the power of righteousness flowing through him, Ben strikes the lock off the door. The acts and Ben’s hands burn with blue fire. Ben and Mark clasp hands, and Ben tells him he loves him.

Together, they enter the root cellar. Barlow’s coffin stands against the wall opposite the door. The other residents of the boardinghouse lie on the floor between Ben and Mark and the coffin.

The coffin seems to weigh almost nothing as they carry it out of the root cellar into the basement. They set it down beside Cody’s body and open the lid. Inside lies Barlow glaring up at them with open eyes. Mark looks into those eyes and is snared in Barlow’s hypnotic gaze. He has been carrying Sheriff McCaslin’s pistol in his pocket. He pulls it out and tries to shoot Ben. Ben knocks him unconscious and turns back to Barlow. The sun is going down. Ben fumbles for his stake and hammer, then realizes he dropped them when he was breaking the lock off the root-cellar door. He hurries to get them, but the sun goes down, and Barlow sits up. Ben locks eyes with him and feels his will draining. In a last spasm, he plunges the stake into Barlow’s chest and pounds it in. Barlow ages, withers, and shrivels into dust. Ben feels something invisible pass him.

Mark, having recovered consciousness, screams a warning. The other vampires are emerging from the root cellar. They flee.