Salem’s Lot

Salem’s Lot by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King Read Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen King
Tags: Horror
resting on the door jamb. I could see the doorknob, silvery and a little tarnished in the place where palms had gripped it. When I pulled on it, the bottom edge of the door gave a scream against the wood like a woman in pain. If I had been straight, I think I would have turned around and gotten the hell out right then. But I was pumped full of adrenaline, and I grabbed it in both hands and pulled for all I was worth. It flew open. And there was Hubie, hanging from the beam with his body silhouetted against the light from the window.’
    ‘Oh, Ben, don’t-’ she said nervously.
    ‘No, I’m telling you the truth,’ he insisted. ‘The truth of what a nine-year-old boy saw and what the man remembers twenty-four years later, anyway. Hubie was hanging there, and his face wasn’t black at all. It was green. The eyes were puffed shut. His hands were livid… ghastly. And then he opened his eyes.’
    Ben took a huge drag on his cigarette and pitched it out his window into the dark.
    ‘I let out a scream that probably could have been heard for two miles. And then I ran. I fell halfway downstairs, got up, and ran out the front door and straight down the road. The kids were waiting for me about half a mile down. That’s when I noticed I still had the glass snow globe in my hand. And I’ve still got it.’
    ‘You don’t really think you saw Hubert Marsten, do you, Ben?’ Far up ahead she could see the yellow blinking light that signaled the center of town and was glad for it.
    After a long pause, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said it with difficulty and reluctance, as if he would have rather said no and closed the subject thereby. ‘Probably I was so keyed up that I hallucinated the whole thing. On the other hand, there may be some truth in that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of… dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of An imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge, and cause it to produce an active manifestation of… of something. I’m not talking about ghosts, precisely. I’m talking about a kind of psychic television in three dimensions. Perhaps even something alive. A monster, if you like.’
    She took one of his cigarettes and lit it.
    ‘Anyway, I slept with the light on in my bedroom for weeks after, and I’ve dreamed about opening that door off and on for the rest of my life. Whenever I’m in stress, the dream comes.’
    ‘That’s terrible.’
    ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘Not very, anyway. We all have our bad dreams.’ He gestured with a thumb at the silent, sleeping houses they were passing on Jointner Avenue. ‘Sometimes I wonder that the very boards of those houses don’t cry out with the awful things that happen in dreams.’ He paused. ‘Come on down to Eva’s and sit on the porch for a while, if you like. I can’t invite you in-rules of the house-but I’ve got a couple of Cokes in the icebox and some Bacardi in my room, if you’d like a nightcap.’
    ‘I’d like one very much.’
    He turned onto Railroad Street, popped off the headlights, and turned into the small dirt parking lot which served the rooming house. The back porch was painted white with red trim, and the three wicker chairs lined up on it looked toward the Royal River. The river itself was a dazzling dream. There was a late summer moon caught in the trees on the river’s far bank, three-quarters full, and it had painted a silver path across the water. With the town silent, she could hear the faint foaming sound as water spilled down the sluiceways of the dam.
    ‘Sit down. I’ll be back.’
    He went in, closing the screen door softly behind him, and she sat down in one of the rockers.
    She liked him in spite of his strangeness. She was not a believer in love at first sight, although she did believe that instant lust (going under the more innocent name of infatuation) occurred frequently. And yet he wasn’t a man that would

Similar Books

A Killer Past

Maris Soule

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil

Sugar Cube

Kir Jensen

SS-GB

Len Deighton

Her Wedding Wish

Jillian Hart

Life Before Man

Margaret Atwood

Unperfect Souls

Mark Del Franco

The Widow's Season

Laura Brodie