“Christ, there’s nobody here,” Royal Snow said, swigging the last of his Pepsi and dropping the empty to the floor of the cab. “We’ll get arrested for burglars.”

“There’s somebody,” Hank Peters said. “Cop.”

It wasn’t precisely a cop; it was a night watchman. He shone his light in at them. “Either of you guys Lawrence Crewcut?”

“Crockett,” Royal said. “We’re from him. Come to pick up some boxes.”

“Good,” the night watchman said. “Come on in the office. I got an invoice for you to sign.” He gestured to Peters, who was behind the wheel. “Back up right over there. Those double doors with the light burning. See?”

“Yeah.” He put the truck in reverse.

Royal Snow followed the night watchman into the office where a coffeemaker was burbling. The clock over the pin-up calendar said 7:04. The night watchman scrabbled through some papers on the desk and came up with a clipboard. “Sign there.”

Royal signed his name.

“You want to watch out when you go in there. Turn on the lights. There’s rats.”

“I’ve never seen a rat that wouldn’t run from one of these,” Royal said, and swung his work-booted foot in an arc.

“These are wharf rats, sonny,” the watchman said dryly. “They’ve run off with bigger men than you.”

Royal went back out and walked over to the warehouse door. The night watchman stood in the doorway of the shack, watching him. “Look out,” Royal said to Peters. “The old guy said there was rats.”

“Okay.” He sniggered. “Good ole Larry Crewcut.”

Royal found the light switch inside the door and turned it on. There was something about the atmosphere, heavy with the mixed aromas of salt and wood rot and wetness, that stifled hilarity. That, and the thought of rats.

The boxes were stacked in the middle of the wide warehouse floor. The place was otherwise empty, and the collection looked a little portentous as a result. The sideboard was in the center, taller than the others, and the only one not stamped “Barlow and Straker, 27 Jointner Avenue, Jer. Lot, Maine.”

“Well, this don’t look too bad,” Royal said. He consulted his copy of the invoice and then counted boxes. “Yeah, they’re all here.”

“There are rats,” Hank said. “Hear ’em?”

“Yeah, miserable things. I hate ’em.”

They both fell silent for a moment, listening to the squeak and patter coming from the shadows.

“Well, let’s get with it,” Royal said. “Let’s put that big baby on first so it won’t be in the way when we get to the store.”

“Okay.”

They walked over to the box, and Royal took out his pocketknife. With one quick gesture he had slit the brown invoice envelope taped to the side.

“Hey,” Hank said. “Do you think we ought to—”

“We gotta make sure we got the right thing, don’t we? If we screw up, Larry’ll tack our asses to his bulletin board.” He pulled the invoice out and looked at it.

“What’s it say?” Hank asked.

“Heroin,” Royal said judiciously. “Two hundred pounds of the shit. Also two thousand girlie books from Sweden, three hundred gross of French ticklers—”

“Gimme that.” Hank snatched it away. “Sideboard,” he said. “Just like Larry told us. From London, England. Portland, Maine, P.O.E. French ticklers, my ass. Put this back.”

Royal did. “Something funny about this,” he said.

“Yeah, you. Funny like the Italian Army.”

“No, no shit. There’s no customs stamp on this fucker. Not on the box, not on the invoice envelope, not on the invoice. No stamp.”

“They probably do ’em in that ink that only shows up under a special black light.”

“They never did when I was on the docks. Christ, they stamped cargo ninety ways for Sunday. You couldn’t grab a box without getting blue ink up to your elbows.”

“Good. I’m very glad. But my wife happens to go to bed very early and I had hopes of getting some tonight.”

“Maybe if we took a look inside—”

“No way. Come on. Grab it.”

Royal shrugged. They tipped the box, and something shifted heavily inside. The box was a bitch to lift. It could be one of those fancy dressers, all right. It was heavy enough.

Grunting, they staggered out to the truck and heaved it onto the hydraulic lifter with identical cries of relief. Royal stood back while Hank operated the lift. When it was even with the truck body, they climbed up and walked it inside.

There was something about the box he didn’t like. It was more than the lack of customs stamp. An indefinable something. He looked at it until Hank ran down the back gate.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the rest of them.”

The other boxes had regulation customs stamps, except for three that had been shipped here from inside the United States. As they loaded each box onto the truck, Royal checked it off on the invoice form and initialed it. They stacked all of the boxes bound for the new store near the back gate of the truck, away from the sideboard.

“Now, who in the name of God is going to buy all this stuff?” Royal asked when they had finished. “A Polish rocking chair, a German clock, a spinning wheel from Ireland…Christ Almighty, I bet they charge a frigging fortune.”

“Tourists,” Hank said wisely. “Tourists’ll buy anything. Some of those people from Boston and New York…they’d buy a bag of cow-shit if it was an oldbag.”

“I don’t like that big box, neither,” Royal said. “No customs stamp, that’s a hell of a funny thing.”

“Well, let’s get it where it’s going.”

They drove back to ’salem’s Lot without speaking, Hank driving heavy on the gas. This was one errand he wanted done. He didn’t like it. As Royal had said, it was damn peculiar.

He drove around to the back of the new store, and the back door was unlocked, as Larry had said it would be. Royal tried the light switch just inside with no result.

“That’s nice,” he grumbled. “We get to unload this stuff in the goddamn dark…say, does it smell a little funny in here to you?”

Hank sniffed. Yes, there was an odor, an unpleasant one, but he could not have said exactly what it reminded him of. It was dry and acrid in the nostrils, like a whiff of old corruption.

“It’s just been shut up too long,” he said, shining his flashlight around the long, empty room. “Needs a good airing out.”

“Or a good burning down,” Royal said. He didn’t like it. Something about the place put his back up. “Come on. And let’s try not to break our legs.”

They unloaded the boxes as quickly as they could, putting each one down carefully. Half an hour later, Royal closed the back door with a sigh of relief and snapped one of the new padlocks on it.

“That’s half of it,” he said.

“The easy half,” Hank answered. He looked up toward the Marsten House, which was dark and shuttered tonight. “I don’t like goin’ up there, and I ain’t afraid to say so. If there was ever a haunted house, that’s it. Those guys must be crazy, tryin’ to live there. Probably queer for each other anyway.”

“Like those fag interior decorators,” Royal agreed. “Probably trying to turn it into a showplace. Good for business.”

“Well, if we got to do it, let’s get with it.”

They spared a last look for the crated sideboard leaning against the side of the U-Haul and then Hank pulled the back door down with a bang. He got in behind the wheel and they drove up Jointner Avenue onto the Brooks Road. A minute later the Marsten House loomed ahead of them, dark and crepitating, and Royal felt the first thread of real fear worm its way into his belly.

“Lordy, that’s a creepy place,” Hank murmured. “Who’d want to live there?”

“I don’t know. You see any lights on behind those shutters?”

“No.”

The house seemed to lean toward them, as if awaiting their arrival. Hank wheeled the truck up the driveway and around to the back. Neither of them looked too closely at what the bouncing headlights might reveal in the rank grass of the backyard. Hank felt a strain of fear enter his heart that he had not even felt in Nam, although he had been scared most of his time there. That was a rational fear. Fear that you might step on a pongee stick and see your foot swell up like some noxious green balloon, fear that some kid in black p.j.’s whose name you couldn’t even fit in your mouth might blow your head off with a Russian rifle, fear that you might draw a Crazy Jake on patrol that might want you to blow up everyone in a village where the Cong had been a week before. But this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house—boards and hinges and nails and sills. There was no reason, really no reason, to feel that each splintered crack was exhaling its own chalky aroma of evil. That was just plain stupid thinking. Ghosts? He didn’t believe in ghosts. Not after Nam.