Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route 12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

FOUR

Ben drove back the next day at dawn, leaving Mark in the motel room. He stopped at a busy hardware store in Westbrook and bought a spade and a pick.

’Salem’s Lot lay silent under a dark sky from which rain had not yet begun to fall. Few cars moved on the streets. Spencer’s was open but now the Excellent Café was shut up, all the green blinds drawn, the menus removed from the windows, the small daily special chalkboard erased clean.

The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock ’n’ roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title: “They Only Come Out at Night.”

He went to Eva’s first, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and pushed the door to his room open. Just the same as he had left it, the bed unmade, an open roll of Life Savers on his desk. There was an empty tin wastebasket under the desk and he pulled it out into the middle of the floor.

He took his manuscript, threw it in, and made a paper spill of the title page. He lit it with his Cricket, and when it flared up he tossed it in on top of the drift of typewritten pages. The flame tasted them, found them good, and began to crawl eagerly over the paper. Corners charred, turned upward, blackened. Whitish smoke began to billow out of the wastebasket, and without thinking about it, he leaned over his desk and opened the window.

His hand found the paperweight—the glass globe that had been with him since his boyhood in this nighted town—grabbed unknowing in a dreamlike visit to a monster’s house. Shake it up and watch the snow float down.

He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy (as Mark Petrie was now), you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasyland of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again.

It was his own face.

He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shattered.

He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.

FIVE

He went down into the cellar to get Jimmy’s body, and that was the hardest trip of all. The coffin lay where it had the night before, empty even of dust. Yet…not entirely empty. The stake was in there, and something else. He felt his gorge rise. Teeth. Barlow’s teeth—all that was left of him. Ben reached down, picked them up—and they twisted in his hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite.

With a disgusted cry he threw them outward, scattering them.

“God,” he whispered, rubbing his hand against his shirt. “Oh, my dear God. Please let that be the end. Let it be the end of him.”

SIX

Somehow he managed to get Jimmy, still bundled up in Eva’s drapes, out of the cellar. He tucked the bundle into the trunk of Jimmy’s Buick and then drove out to the Petrie house, the pick and shovel resting next to Jimmy’s black bag in the backseat. In a wooded clearing behind the Petrie house and close to the babble of Taggart Stream, he spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon digging a wide grave four feet deep. Into it he put Jimmy’s body and the Petries, still wrapped in the sofa dustcover.

He began filling in the grave of these clean ones at two-thirty. He began to shovel faster and faster as the light began its long drain from the cloudy sky. Sweat that was not wholly from exertion condensed on his skin.

The hole was filled in by four. He tamped in the sods as well as he could, and drove back to town with the earth-clotted pick and shovel in the trunk of Jimmy’s car. He parked it in front of the Excellent Café, leaving the keys in the ignition.

He paused for a moment, looking around. The deserted business buildings with their false fronts seemed to lean crepitatingly over the street. The rain, which had started around noon, fell softly and slowly, as if in mourning. The little park where he had met Susan Norton was empty and forlorn. The shades of the Municipal Building were drawn. A “Be back soon” sign hung in the window of Larry Crockett’s Insurance and Real Estate office with hollow jauntiness. And the only sound was soft rain.

He walked up toward Railroad Street, his heels clicking emptily on the sidewalk. When he got to Eva’s, he paused by his car for a moment, looking around for the last time. Nothing moved.

The town was dead. All at once he knew it for sure and true, just as he had known for sure that Miranda was dead when he had seen her shoe lying in the road.

He began to cry.

He was still crying when he drove past the Elks sign, which read: “You are now leaving Jerusalem’s Lot, a nice little town. Come again!”

He got on the turnpike. The Marsten House was blotted out by the trees as he went down the feeder ramp. He began to drive south toward Mark, toward his life.

Epilogue

Among these decimated villages

Upon this headland naked to the south wind

With the trail of mountains before us, hiding you,

Who will reckon up our decision to forget?

Who will accept our offering at this end of autumn?

G

EORGE

S

EFERIS

Now she’s eyeless.

The snakes she held once

Eat up her hands.

G

EORGE

S

EFERIS

From a scrapbook kept by Ben Mears( all clippings from the PortlandPress-Herald):

November 19, 1975 (p. 27):

JERUSALEM’S LOT—The Charles V. Pritchett family, who bought a farm in the Cumberland County town of Jerusalem’s Lot only a month ago, are moving out because things keep going bump in the night, according to Charles and Amanda Pritchett, who moved here from Portland. The farm, a local landmark on Schoolyard Hill, was previously owned by Charles Griffen. Griffen’s father was the owner of Sunshine Dairy, Inc., which was absorbed by the Slewfoot Dairy Corporation in 1962. Charles Griffen, who sold the farm through a Portland realtor for what Pritchett called “a bargain basement price,” could not be reached for comment. Amanda Pritchett first told her husband about the “funny noises” in the hayloft shortly after…

January 4, 1976 (p. 1):

JERUSALEM’S LOT—A bizarre car crash occurred last night or early this morning in the small southern Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot. Police theorize from skid marks found near the scene that the car, a late-model sedan, was traveling at an excessive speed when it left the road and struck a Central Maine Power utility pole. The car was a total wreck, but although blood was found on the front seat and the dashboard, no passengers have yet been found. Police say that the car was registered to Mr Gordon Phillips of Scarborough. According to a neighbor, Phillips and his family had been on their way to see relatives in Yarmouth. Police theorize that Phillips, his wife, and their two children may have wandered off in a daze and become lost. Plans for a search have been…