A full year ago, a new sign had been nailed up on the peeling boards beside the ramshackle front porch, and this sign said: SOLD.

 

InThe Lot (I) after Ben Mears contemplates the Marsten House at 4 o’clock, King has the following passage:

He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door—and froze, staring out the window. Something was different out there, different than it had been yesterday.

Not in the town, certainly; it drowsed away the late afternoon under a sky of that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on particularly fine days in late September.

He could look across the two-story buildings on Momson Avenue, see their flat, asphalted roofs, across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared beyond the shoulder of that first wooded hill. His eye followed up naturally to the break in the woods where the Burns Road cut through, and to the Marsten House which sat overlooking the town.

 

 

 

The shutters were closed.

When he had come back to Momson [’Salem’s Lot], one of the things that had made him decide to stay and write the book that had been increasingly on his mind had been the close correspondence between his memory of the Marsten House and its actuality, twenty-four years later. It was still unpainted, still leaning and ominous and seemingly pregnant with awful things (and perhaps the suicide-murder perpetrated by Hubie Marsten was only the least of them) that had transpired within its walls. The upstairs windows were still like vacant eyes peering forth from under steep angled eaves like eyebrows—eyes that had been cataracted with patched and faded green shades. The glass in those windows had been long since broken with small boys’ stones, of course, but that added rather than detracted from the overall impression of idiot malignancy.

The shutters had always hung leaningly beside the windows, accordioned back and held with rusty eyehook latches. It seemed to Ben that they had been flakingly green in 1951 (the house itself had been a peeled and ruinous white), but now all the color was gone from them, and like the house, they were a uniform and weatherbeaten gray.

But they had been pulled shut.

He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of fear in his belly that he did not try to analyze. He had thought occupancy could only destroy the fragile splice of child-memory and adult-reality that was so important to the book he was writing, unless it was his own occupancy—a thought that still made him feel fear-sick. The new owner would reshingle, or cut the lawn, or tear off the old ivy trellis and repaint. But the closing of the shutters in the daytime had added something unreckoned with, something he most emphatically didn’t like.

 

InThe Lot (I), section 20 (11:59 PM ), when Straker sacrifices the body of Ralphie Glick, King’s original passages read:

In the Burns Road cemetery, a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time, for the instant of midnight when God hides His face.

“O my father,” the figure said, its voice soft and cultured, flavored with a faint and unidentifiable accent, “favor me now. Lord of Flies, Prince of Darkness, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. Blood I bring, the water of life. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait a sign to begin your work.”

The voice died away. A wind sprang up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses, and a whiff of corruption from the dump at the end of the road.

A blue light began to glow at the far end of the cemetery, and intensified. In its glow, the figure’s countenance was discovered: elderly, with sunken eyes, and strangely heavy, almost negroid lips. The hair, swept back from the forehead, was pure white.

The blue glow intensified, grew searing, and took on a hunched, shifting shape that seemed to stretch up and up, beyond the close and hemming horizon of trees, to the sky itself.

A Voice said: “ What do you bring me?”

“This.”

The figure stooped, and then stood with the sleeping figure of a child in his arms.

“It is well.”

The figure bowed.

“Consummate your act, and grow strong.”

It became unspeakable.

 

The chapterDanny Glick and Others ( which King originally had titledStraker) features the scene where Royal Snow and Hank Peters bring the crate with Barlow’s coffin down cellar of the Marsten House. In the first draft, there is no Barlow and Straker antique store and only one box is delivered. When Hank delivers the locks, he sees a rat on the table. The original passage features more rats. Grisly scenes of rats are not so frequent in the published novel:

The beam steadied. Hank sucked in breath and felt the room go hazy around him.

Rats.

Hundreds of them, possibly thousands, all of them massed in ranks and platoons at that elbow bend. Staring at him, their V-shaped upper lips lifted to show the sharp incisors beneath. Their eyes glared at him.

He panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away, shambling into a run. Again that queer odor of putrefaction seemed to fill his nostrils, the smell of age and wet and rotting flesh. He had to get away from it.

His flashlight beam struck the box, and he would have screamed if he had had the strength. That was what was making that queer wooden thumping noise. It was rocking back and forth, and the wood seemed to be straining, bulging. As his eyes took it in, one of the aluminum bands split and flew upward, making a shadow on the wall like a clutching hand…

He ran.

 

InDanny Glick and Others, at the end of the chapter when the nurse finds Danny dead, there is another section with the doctor reporting on him, and the vampiric condition of Danny is revealed much earlier.

“Dead,” he said, and began to pull the sheet up over the oddly calm face.

Her hand stopped him. “Doctor?”

“Yes?” He blinked at her mildly. He was a thin, intense-looking resident named Burke, and he was losing his hair rapidly.

“Those scratches on his neck are gone.”

He looked. “Yes,” he said indifferently, and covered the face of Danny Glick with the sheet. “Healed, probably.”

“I thought he was alive,” she said, and gripped her elbows to restrain a very un-R.N.-like shiver. “I thought he got up and opened the window and fainted. He looks like a…a waxwork.”

“Really?” he said without interest, and turned away. “It’s a condition that sometimes predates rigor mortis. Known in the argot as mortician’s complexion.”

“God,” she muttered.

They went out.

Under the sheet, Danny Glick opened flat obsidian eyes and smiled. The teeth discovered by that smile were white and cruelly sharp.

 

After Ben and Susan make love in the park inBen (II), they have a different discussion, a longer one, about the nature of the Marsten House and evil.

“The book?” she asked. “You were going to tell me about that before we were so sweetly interrupted.”

“The book is about what happened to me at the Marsten House,” he said slowly. “I can see it from my window. And the paperweight I use to hold down my manuscript is the snow-dome I had in my hand when I ran out of there.”

“Ben, that sounds morbid. Morbid as hell.” Her face was sober, and the flat glow of the streetlights milked her tan, making her look pallid.

“It is,” he said. “But didn’t I tell you writing was an act of exorcism? I’m writing this one out of my nightmares, and I wouldn’t mind if I milked that reservoir dry. You know, the other three books were all quite cheerful… Conway’s Daughterespecially. They all had happy endings. Do you know what Brewster at the The New York Timessaid about the conclusion of Air Dance? ‘Ben Mears reminds one of a mentally regressive street-performer doing a tap-dance on the gallows of the American prison system.’”