'Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

’Salem’s Lot is reputed to be haunted. Sometimes colored lights are reported hovering over the Central Maine Power lines that bisect the township, and if you suggest that the inhabitants of the Lot have been carried off by UFOs, no one will laugh. There has been some talk of a “dark coven” of young people who were practicing the black mass in town and, perhaps, brought the wrath of God Himself on the namesake of the Holy Land’s holiest city. Others, of a less supernatural bent, remember the young men who “disappeared” in the Houston, Texas, area some three years ago only to be discovered in grisly mass graves.

“O my father, favor me now. Lord of Flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work.”

“Lord God, through your mercy those who have lived in faith find eternal peace. Bless this grave and send your angel to watch over it. As we bury the body of Daniel Glick, welcome him into your presence, and with your saints let him rejoice in you forever. We ask it through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

“With faith in Jesus Christ, we reverently bring the body of this child to be buried in its human imperfection. Let us pray with confidence to God, who gives life to all things, that he will raise up this mortal body to the perfection and company of saints.”

said, “who told us: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The man who believes in me will live even though he dies, and every living person who puts his faith in me will never suffer eternal death.’ Lord, you wept at the death of Lazarus, your friend: comfort us in our sorrow. We ask this in faith.”

According to the old literature, a vampire cannot simply walk into a man’s house and suck his blood. No. He has to be invited. But Mike Ryerson invited Danny Glick in last night. And I invited Mike myself!”

The town has its secrets, and keeps them well. The people don’t know them all. They know old Albie Crane’s wife ran off with a traveling man from New York City—or they think they know it. But Albie cracked her skull open after the traveling man had left her cold and then he tied a block on her feet and tumbled her down the old well and twenty years later Albie died peacefully in his bed of a heart attack, just as his son Joe will die later in this story, and perhaps someday a kid will stumble on the old well where it is hidden by choked blackberry creepers and pull back the whitened, weather-smoothed boards and see that crumbling skeleton staring blankly up from the bottom of that rock-lined pit, the sweet traveling man’s necklace still dangling, green and mossy, over her rib cage. They know that Hubie Marsten killed his wife, but they don’t know what he made her do first, or how it was with them in that sun-sticky kitchen in the moments before he blew her head in, with the smell of honeysuckle hanging in the hot air like the gagging sweetness of an uncovered charnel pit. They don’t know that she begged him to do it. Some of the older women in town—Mabel Werts, Glynis Mayberry, Audrey Hersey—remember that Larry McLeod found some charred papers in the upstairs fireplace, but none of them know that the papers were the accumulation of twelve years’ correspondence between Hubert Marsten and an amusingly antique Austrian nobleman named Breichen, or that the correspondence of th...

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”

“He thrusts his fists agaisnt the post and still insists he sees the ghosts.” Also used by Bill Denbrough in IT to overcome his stuttering.