Read Salem’s Lot for Free Online

mine-but he got a job with the post office helping Kenny Danies and so that was all right. The kids were wearing their hair longer and not combing it neatly like their fathers, but nobody really noticed anymore. When they threw the dress code out at the Consolidated High School, Aggie Corliss wrote a letter to the Cumberland Ledger , but Aggie had been writing to the Ledger every week for years, mostly about the evils of liquor and the wonder of accepting Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior.
    Some of the kids took dope. Horace Kilby’s boy Frank went up before Judge Hooker in August and got fined fifty dollars (the judge agreed to let him pay the fine with profits from his paper route), but alcohol was a bigger problem. Lots of kids hung out at Dell’s since the liquor age went down to eighteen. They went rip-assing home as if they wanted to resurface the road with rubber, and every now and then someone would get killed. Like when Billy Smith ran into a tree on the Deep Cut Road at ninety and killed both himself and his girl friend, LaVerne Dube.
    But except for these things, the Lot’s knowledge of the country’s torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.

5
    Ann Norton was ironing when her daughter burst in with a bag of groceries, thrust a book with a rather thin-faced young man on the back jacket in her face, and began to babble.
    ‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘Turn down the TV and tell me.’ Susan choked off Peter Marshall, who was giving away thousands of dollars on ‘The Hollywood Squares’, and told her mother about meeting Ben Mears. Mrs Norton made herself nod with calm and sympathetic understanding as the story spilled out, despite the yellow warning lights that always flashed when Susan mentioned a new boy-men now, she supposed, although it was hard to think Susie could be old enough for men. But the lights were a little brighter today.
    ‘Sounds exciting,’ she said, and put another one of her husband’s shirts on the ironing board.
    ‘He was really nice,’ Susan said. ‘Very natural.’
    ‘Hoo, my feet,’ Mrs Norton said. She set the iron on its fanny, making it hiss balefully, and eased into the Boston rocker by the picture window. She reached a, Parliament out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it. ‘Are you sure he’s all right, Susie?’
    Susan smiled a little defensively. ‘Sure, I’m sure. He looks like… oh, I don’t know-a college instructor or something.’
    ‘They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener,’ Mrs Norton said reflectively.
    ‘Moose shit,’ Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother.
    ‘Let me see the book.’ She held a hand out for it,
    Susan gave it to her, suddenly remembering the homosexual rape scene in the prison section.
    ‘ Air Dance ,’ Ann Norton said meditatively, and began to thumb pages at random. Susan waited, resigned. Her mother would bird-dog it. She always did.
    The windows were up, and a lazy forenoon breeze ruffled the yellow curtains in the kitchen-which Mom insisted on calling the pantry, as if they lived in the lap of class. It was a nice house, solid brick, a little hard to heat in the winter but cool as a grotto in the summer. They were on a gentle rise of land on outer Brock Street, and from the picture window where Mrs Norton sat you could see all the way into town. The view was a pleasant one, and in the winter it could be spectacular with long, twinkling vistas of unbroken snow and distance-dwindled buildings casting yellow oblongs of light on the snow fields.
    ‘Seems I read a review of this in the Portland paper. It wasn’t very good.’
    ‘I like it,’ Susan said steadily. ‘And I like him.’
    ‘Perhaps Floyd would like him, too,’ Mrs Norton said idly. ‘You ought to introduce them.’
    Susan felt a real stab of anger and was dismayed by it. She thought that she and her