SALEM'S LOT IV / SUSAN (1)
491 Words
“I’d love it. I’ve been living on TV dinners since I moved in.”
“Six o’clock? We eat early in Sticksville.”
“Sure. Fine. And speaking of home, I better get you there. Come on.”
They didn’t speak on the ride back until she could see the night-light twinkling on top of the hill, the one her mother always left on when she was out.
“I wonder who’s up there tonight?” she asked, looking toward the Marsten House.
“The new owner, probably,” he said noncommittally.
“It didn’t look like electricity, that light,” she mused. “Too yellow, too faint. Kerosene lamp, maybe.”
“They probably haven’t had a chance to have the power turned on yet.”
“Maybe. But almost anyone with a little foresight would call up the power company before they moved in.”
He didn’t reply. They had come to her driveway.
“Ben,” she said suddenly, “is your new book about the Marsten House?”
He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. “It’s late.”
She smiled at him. “I don’t mean to snoop.”
“It’s all right. But maybe another time…in daylight.”
“Okay.”
“You better get in, girly. Six tomorrow?”
She looked at her watch. “Six today.”
“Night, Susan.”
“Night.”
She got out and ran lightly up the path to the side door, then turned and waved as he drove away. Before she went in, she added sour cream to the milkman’s order. With baked potatoes, that would add a little class to supper.
She paused a minute longer before going in, looking up at the Marsten House.
In his small, boxlike room he undressed with the light off and crawled into bed n***d. She was a nice girl, the first nice one since Miranda had died. He hoped he wasn’t trying to turn her into a new Miranda; that would be painful for him and horribly unfair to her.
He lay down and let himself drift. Shortly before sleep took him, he hooked himself up on one elbow, looked past the square shadow of his typewriter and the thin sheaf of manuscript beside it, and out the window. He had asked Eva Miller specifically for this room after looking at several, because it faced the Marsten House directly.
The lights up there were still on.
That night he had the old dream for the first time since he had come to Jerusalem’s Lot, and it had not come with such vividness since those terrible maroon days following Miranda’s death in the motorcycle accident. The run up the hallway, the horrible scream of the door as he pulled it open, the dangling figure suddenly opening its hideous puffed eyes, himself turning to the door in the slow, sludgy panic of dreams—
And finding it locked.
- Writer
