What did they do then?

Danny thought they had started to walk again, holding hands. He wasn’t sure. Ralphie had been whimpering about the ghost. Danny told him not to cry, because soon they would be able to see the streetlights of Jointner Avenue. It was only two hundred steps, maybe less. Then something bad had happened.

What? What was the bad thing?

Danny didn’t know.

They argued with him, grew excited, expostulated. Danny only shook his head slowly and uncomprehendingly. Yes, he knew he should remember, but he couldn’t. Honestly, he couldn’t. No, he didn’t remember falling over anything. Just…everything was dark. Very dark. And the next thing he remembered was lying on the path by himself. Ralphie was gone.

Parkins Gillespie said there was no point in sending men into the woods that night. Too many deadfalls. Probably the boy had just wandered off the path. He and Nolly Gardener and Tony Glick and Henry Petrie went up and down the path and along the shoulders of both South Jointner and Brock streets, hailing with battery-powered bullhorns.

Early the next morning, both the Cumberland and the state police began a coordinated search of the wood lot. When they found nothing, the search was widened. They beat the bushes for four days, and Mr and Mrs Glick wandered through the woods and fields, picking their way around the deadfalls left by the ancient fire, calling their son’s name with endless and wrenching hope.

When there was no result, Taggart Stream and the Royal River were dragged. No result.

On the morning of the fifth day, Marjorie Glick woke her husband at 4:00 AM, terrified and hysterical. Danny had collapsed in the upstairs hallway, apparently on his way to the bathroom. An ambulance bore him away to Central Maine General Hospital. The preliminary diagnosis was severe and delayed emotional shock.

The doctor in charge, a man named Gorby, took Mr Glick aside.

“Has your boy ever been subject to asthma attacks?”

Mr Glick, blinking rapidly, shook his head. He had aged ten years in less than a week.

“Any history of rheumatic fever?”

“Danny? No…not Danny.”

“Has he had a TB skin patch during the last year?”

“TB? My boy got TB?”

“Mr Glick, we’re only trying to find out—”

“Marge! Margie, come down here!”

Marjorie Glick got up and walked slowly down the corridor. Her face was pale, her hair absently combed. She looked like a woman in the grip of a deep migraine headache.

“Did Danny have a TB skin patch at school this year?”

“Yes,” she said dully. “When he started school. No reaction.”

Gorby asked, “Does he cough in the night?”

“No.”

“Complain of aches in the chest or joints?”

“No.”

“Painful urination?”

“No.”

“Any abnormal bleeding? Bloody noses or bloody stool or even an abnormal number of scrapes and bruises?”

“No.”

Gorby smiled and nodded. “We’d like to keep him for tests, if we may.”

“Sure,” Tony said. “Sure. I got Blue Cross.”

“His reactions are very slow,” the doctor said. “We’re going to do some X-rays, a marrow test, a white count—”

Marjorie Glick’s eyes had slowly been widening. “Has Danny got leukemia?” she whispered.

“Mrs Glick, that’s hardly—”

But she had fainted.

TWO

Ben Mears was one of the ’salem’s Lot volunteers who beat the bushes for Ralphie Glick, and he got nothing for his pains other than pants cuffs full of cockleburs and an aggravated case of hay fever brought on by late summer goldenrod.

On the third day of the search he came into the kitchen of Eva’s ready to eat a can of ravioli and then fall into bed for a nap before writing. He found Susan Norton bustling around the kitchen stove and preparing some kind of hamburger casserole. The men just home from work were sitting around the table, pretending to talk, and ogling her—she was wearing a faded check shirt tied at the midriff and cutoff corduroy shorts. Eva Miller was ironing in a private alcove off the kitchen.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” he asked.

“Cooking you something decent before you fall away to a shadow,” she said, and Eva snorted laughter from behind the angle of the wall. Ben felt his ears burn.

“Cooks real good, she does,” Weasel said. “I can tell. I been watchin’.”

“If you was watchin’ any more, your eyes woulda fell outta their sockets,” Grover Verrill said, and cackled.

Susan covered the casserole, put it in the oven, and they went out on the back porch to wait for it. The sun was going down red and inflamed.

“Any luck?”

“No. Nothing.” He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one.

“You smell like you took a bath in Old Woodsman’s,” she said.

“Fat lot of good it did.” He held out his arm and showed her a number of puffed insect bites and half-healed scratches. “Son of a bitching mosquitoes and goddamn pricker bushes.”

“What do you think happened to him, Ben?”

“God knows.” He exhaled smoke. “Maybe somebody crept up behind the older brother, coshed him with a sock full of sand or something, and abducted the kid.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

Ben looked at her to see if she wanted an honest answer or merely a hopeful one. He took her hand and locked his fingers through hers. “Yes,” he said briefly. “I think the kid is dead. No conclusive proof yet, but I think so.”

She shook her head slowly. “I hope you’re wrong. My mom and some of the other ladies have been in to sit with Mrs Glick. She’s out of her mind and so is her husband. And the other boy just wanders around like a ghost.”

“Um,” Ben said. He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.

“…night?”

“Hmm? Sorry.” He looked around at her.

“I said, my dad would like you to come over tomorrow night. Can you?”

“Will you be there?”

“Sure, I will,” she said, and looked at him.

“All right. Good.” He wanted to look at her—she was lovely in the sunset light—but his eyes were drawn toward the Marsten House as if by a magnet.

“It draws you, doesn’t it?” she said, and the reading of his thought, right down to the metaphor, was nearly uncanny.

“Yes. It does.”

“Ben, what’s this new book about?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Give it time. I’ll tell you as soon as I can. It’s…got to work itself out.”

She wanted to say I love youat that precise moment, say it with the ease and lack of self-consciousness with which the thought had risen to the surface of her mind, but she bit the words off behind her lips. She did not want to say it while he was looking…looking up there.

She got up. “I’ll check the casserole.”

When she left him, he was smoking and looking up at the Marsten House.

THREE

Lawrence Crockett was sitting in his office on the morning of the twenty-second, pretending to read his Monday correspondence and keeping an eye on his secretary’s jahoobies, when the telephone rang. He had been thinking about his business career in ’salem’s Lot, about that small, twinkling car in the Marsten House driveway, and about deals with the devil.

Even before the deal with Straker had been consummated (that’s some word, all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of his secretary’s blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man in ’salem’s Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it. The office was old, dusty, and lighted by two fly-specked yellow globes. The desk was an ancient rolltop, littered with papers, pens, and correspondence. A glue pot stood on one side of it and on the other was a square glass paperweight that showed pictures of his family on its different faces. Poised perilously on top of a stack of ledgers was a glass fish bowl filled with matches, and a sign on the front said, “For Our Matchless Friends.” Except for three fireproof steel filing cabinets and the secretary’s desk in a small enclosure, the office was barren.