'Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

“It was a deep and terrible weeping. It came from the cellar of his soul.

It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.

but I didn’t leave. I really wanted to prove myself. So I went upstairs to where he hung himself.” “Oh my God,” she said. “Reach in the glove box and get me a cigarette, would you? I’m trying to quit, but I need one for this.”

Danny stopped. And in the way of children, he did feel something and knew they were no longer alone. A great hush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them.

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.

if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

as if to verify his presence among these people.

Ben walked down the hall and stood in front of the guest room door. He did not believe the monstrosity Matt had implied, but nonetheless he found himself engulfed by a wave of the blackest fright he had ever known.

“That explains it, then. I suspect his theory is a rather old parapsychological wheeze—that humans manufacture evil just as they manufacture snot or excrement or fingernail parings. That it doesn’t go away. Specifically, that the Marsten House may have become a kind of evil dry-cell; a malign storage battery.”

It was from her spinal cord, a much older network of nerves and ganglia, that the black dread emanated in waves.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.

She had heard Matt’s voice and had heard a terrible toneless incantation: I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher. The voice that had spoken those words had no more human quality than a dog’s bark.

“I can assure you,” he said a little more sharply than he had intended, “that the Jerusalem’s Lot telephone service needs no vampires to disrupt it.” The lights went out.

At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground. At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe’s castle surrounded by the Red Death. Horror is destroyed by boredom. Love is a dream. Parkins Gillespie shambled from his office desk to the coffeepot, looking like a very thin ape that had been sick with a wasting illness. Behind him, a game of solitaire was laid out like a clock. He had heard several screams in the night, the strange, jagged beating of a horn on the air, and once, running feet. He had not gone out to investigate any of these things. His lined and socketed face was haunted

Here is the peculiar thing: None of those awake in Jerusalem’s Lot knew the truth. A handful might have suspected, but even their suspicions were as vague and unformed as three-month fetuses. Yet they had gone unhesitatingly to bureau drawers, attic boxes, or bedroom jewel collections to find whatever religious hex symbols they might possess. They did this without thinking, the way a man driving a long distance alone will sing without knowing he sings. They walked slowly from room to room, as if their bodies had become glassy and fragile, and they turned on all the lights, and they did not look out their windows.