At the end ofThe Lot (II), after we meet Donald Callahan and before the chapter on Matt, King has this section on the town, completely excised from the published novel:
The town slept.
The cities sleep uneasily, like paranoiacs who spend their days in fear and their exhausted nights fleeing crooked shadows to that final hotel room where, as Auden says, it has been waiting all the time under one naked lightbulb. Their sleep is marred by the rising screams of the squad-car sirens, by the endless neon, by taxis that cruise restlessly like yellow wolves. Their sleep is sweating, fearful, yet vital.
But the town sleeps like a stone, like the dead.
Shops stand closed and dark, and there are only two night-lights: the sign which says POLICE and the lighted circle around the Bulova clock in the small window of Carl Foreman’s Funeral Home. The clock hands stand at quarter of one.
Ben Mears slept, and the Nortons, and Hal Griffen, flat on his back with his mouth open, schoolbooks on his desk, untouched all the weekend which had so lately become Monday morning. Win Purinton slept, and his new puppy—given to him by the boys at the dairy—slept in Doc’s old basket in the pantry, with a two-dollar alarm clock tucked in beside him to ease the loneliness that even dogs can feel. Eva Miller slept in her widow’s bed, twisting laboriously through the night in a slow and subconscious dance of love; and above her, Weasel Craig slept the slow and heavy sleep of wine.
When you come from the city to the town you lie wakeful in the absence of noise at first. You wait for something to break it: the cough of shattering glass, the squeal of tires blistering against the pavement, perhaps a scream. But there is nothing but the unearthly hum of the telephone wires and so you wait and wait and then sleep badly. But when the town gets you, you sleep like the town and the town sleeps deep in its blood, like a bear.
Yet it did not sleep quite so completely as it had, because on the hill above town the lights shone from the Marsten House, as if the eye of the dark itself had opened and disclosed a fearful yellow pupil.
When Ben comes over for dinner at Matthew Burke’s house, right after mixing his bourbon and water, and before eating spaghetti, he speaks of his financial state with Matt.
…as Ben sat down in the steel-legged kitchen chair with his drink, he found himself telling Matt Burke what he had not even told Susan: his financial state, which was far from rock steady.
“Yeah,” he said, “ Conway’s Daughterdid all right; for somebody, anyway. I got an advance of $3,000 against royalties and another three in royalties. The publisher and I split 50–50 on the paperback sale and the movie option, which was picked up by Columbia—and then put back down again when they couldn’t get Robert Mitchum to play Conway.”
“50–50’s not usual, is it?” Matt asked, sitting down.
“No, but it’s not bad for a first novel, which usually dies in the road anyway. And considering I wasn’t agented, I thought I’d done pretty well. I came out with about eighteen thousand dollars, and I put half of it right into some safe stock. Which I’m now selling off, chunk by chunk.”
“But the other books—”
“Well, I got a good advance on Air Dance, and the advance sales were good. The contract was a hell of a lot better, too, but the critics gave it both barrels and it didn’t move very well after that. And just after it came out someone I—I liked a lot died, and I stopped noticing where the money was going for a while. I ended up in Las Vegas. I dropped the last of the advance money on number 16, red, and then rented a cabin in the most Godforsaken western California valley you ever saw. Didn’t see anybody for weeks at a time. Wrote Billy Said Keep Goingin two months. Holt House, which published the first two, turned it down.”
Ben finished the rest of his drink, took a plate of spaghetti from Matt, and thanked him. He ladled sauce over it and twirled a forkful against his spoon. “Fantastic,” he said. “Mama mia.”
“But of course,” Matt said. “What happened then?”
Ben shrugged. “When the script finally got back to me, I was in Mexico, living it up. And all of a sudden I realized I couldn’t afford to live it up. I traded the Pontiac GT I’d bought after the paperback sale of Air Dancefor the Citroën I’m driving now, and crept back across the border.
“That was what happened on the outside. Inside I was in shock. All my life I wanted to be a writer—not an author but a writer—and after I finally had it made, I started feeling it all slip through my fingers. I was in shock. Coming up through Texas on one of those long, straight stretches, I put the car up to ninety and started to feed the pages of Billy through the wing window. I had some crazy idea that I’d leave a trail of words all the way from the goddamn border to New York City, where I was going to throw my damn stupid editor out of his office window. After I’d fed about seventy-five pages, I suddenly came to my senses and hit the brakes with both feet…I left rubber for a quarter of a mile and damn near killed myself. I pulled over onto the shoulder and spent the rest of the day cruising back the way I came, picking them up. I got one hell of a sunburn, but I got all of them but six pages. I rewrote those in an El Paso hotel room and they’re in the book. Better, I think.”
“I haven’t read that one,” Matt said. “It’s still—”
“—on reserve at the library,” Ben finished for him, grinning. “Mrs Starcher told me. Susan hasn’t had a chance to read it and she claims it’s driving her nuts. Apparently it’s been in great demand since I came to Momson. No place else but here, anyway.” He laughed again, a sound that was almost a tuneless bark.
“You got it published, at any rate.”
“Yes, and the critics were a little kinder—although there was still plenty for them to pick apart, apparently. After Holt, Doubleday and Lippincott both turned it down before Putnam’s picked it up. I’m not sure how much they spent on promotion, but I’m sure you could have bought a bunch of bananas with it, if not the cereal to go with it.”
“It died?”
“Not immediately, in spite of all that. It sold a fair number of copies, but the paperback deal is pretty horrible. They’re promoting it sort of as a sequel to Conway’s Daughtereven though the two books have absolutely nothing in common.”
Also in the chapter on Matt, there is a deleted scene in which Matt has a physical checkup with Dr Cody, and they discuss the Glick case and it is here that Matt mentionsDracula. This scene does not appear in the published novel but is referenced several times in it.
Matt’s doctor was Jimmy Cody, a boy whom he had had in English some ten years before. Then he had been a little heller, but he seemed to have grown up nicely in medical school. Even his pimples were gone.
He sat on Jimmy’s examining table and allowed himself to be poked and prodded and fingered while Jimmy asked him how things were going down at the old jail. Matt told him that things were fine; all the irons nicely hot and the manacles well-oiled.
Jimmy laughed. “You can put your shirt on, Mr Burke. You’ll go another forty before you even need an oil change.”
“That’s what they all say,” Matt told him, a little grumpily. He had confessed having some trouble with insomnia and Jimmy, referring to him by the old honorific of “Mr” all the time, had cheerfully refused to prescribe. Just wait, he told himself balefully, buttoning his shirt. Wait until you’re sixty, fellow, and the high point of your day is having a good crap for the first time in a week.
Aloud he said, “It’s a shame about Danny Glick.”
“Funny you should mention that,” said Jimmy. “I was at the hospital the night he died. Was called in for consultation, in fact. I was the Glicks’ family doctor.” He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking of writing the case up for one of the journals. Damn strange.”