Free Salem’s Lot by Stephen King Page A

had washed out of her, that need had remained. God, she had liked to do it!
    In those days, ‘61 and ‘62, people had still been calling him Ed instead of Weasel, and he had still been holding the bottle instead of the other way around. He had a good job on the B&M, and one night in January of 1962 it had happened.
    He paused in the steady waking movements and looked thoughtfully out of the narrow Judas window on the second-floor landing. It was filled with the last bright foolishly golden light of summer, a light that laughed at the cold, rattling autumn and the colder winter that would follow it.
    It had been part her and part him that night, and after it had happened and they were lying together in the darkness of her bedroom, she began to weep and tell him that what they had done was wrong. He told her it had been right, not knowing if it had been right or not and not caring, and there had been another whooping and coughing and screaming around the eaves and her room had been warm and safe and at last they had slept together like spoons in a silverware drawer.
    Ah God and sonny Jesus, time was like a river and he wondered if that writer fella knew that .
    He began to polish the banister again with long, sweeping strokes.

9
    10:00 A.M.
    It was recess time at Stanley Street Elementary School, which was the Lot’s newest and proudest school building. It was a low, glassine four-classroom building that the school district was still paying for, as new and bright and modern as the Brock Street Elementary School was old and dark.
    Richie Boddin, who was the school bully and proud of it, stepped out onto the playground grandly, eyes searching for that smart-ass new kid ‘who knew all the answers in math. No new kid came waltzing into his school without knowing who was boss. Especially some four-eyes queerboy teacher’s pet like this one.
    Richie was eleven years old and weighed 140 pounds. All his life his mother had been calling on people to see what a huge young man her son was. And so he knew he was big. Sometimes he fancied that he could feel the ground tremble underneath his feet when he walked. And when he grew up he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man,
    The fourth- and fifth-graders were terrified of him, and the smaller kids regarded him as a schoolyard totem. When he, moved on to the seventh grade at Brock Street School, their pantheon would be empty of its devil. All this pleased him immensely.
    And there was the Petrie kid, waiting to be chosen up for the recess touch football game.
    ‘Hey!’ Richie yelled.
    Everyone looked around except Petrie. Every eye had a glassy sheen on it, and every pair of eyes showed relief when they saw that Richie’s rested elsewhere.
    ‘Hey you! Four-eyes!’
    Mark Petrie turned and looked at Richie. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the morning sun. He was as tall as Richie, which meant he towered over most of his classmates, but he was slender and his face looked defenseless and bookish.
    ‘Are you speaking to me?’
    "‘Are you speaking to me?" Richie mimicked, his voice a high falsetto. ‘You sound like a queer, four-eyes. You know that?’
    ‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Mark Petrie said.
    Richie took a step forward. ‘I bet you suck, you know that, four-eyes? I bet you suck the old hairy root.’
    ‘Really?’ His polite tone was infuriating.
    ‘Yeah, I heard you really suck it. Not just Thursdays for you. You can’t wait. Every day for you.’
    Kids began to drift over to watch Richie stomp the new boy. Miss Holcomb, who was playground monitor this week, was out front watching the little kids on the swings and seesaws.
    ‘What’s your racket?’ Mark Petrie asked. He was looking at Richie as if he had discovered an interesting new beetle.
    "‘What’s your racket?" Richie mimicked falsetto. ‘I ain’t got no racket. I just heard you were a big fat queer, that’s all.’
    ‘Is that right?’ Mark asked, still polite. ‘I heard that you were a