[塞伦的命运].Salem's.Lot.doc

1、SALEMS LOT1973AUTHORS NOTENo one writes a long novel alone, and I would like to take a moment of your time to thank some of the people who helped with this one: G. Everett McCutcheon, of Hampden Academy, for his practical suggestions and encouragement; Dr John Pearson, of Old Town, Maine, medical ex

2、aminer of Penobscot County and member in good standing of that most excellent medical speciality, general practice; Father Renald Hallee, of St Johns Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine. And of course my wife, whose criticism is as tough and unflinching as ever.Although the towns surrounding salems Lot

3、 are very real, salems Lot itself exists wholly in the authors imagination, and any resemblance between the people who live there and people who live in the real world is coincidental and unintended.S. K.PROLOGUEOld friend, what are you looking for?After those many years abroad you comeWith images y

4、ou tendedUnder foreign skiesFar away from your own landGeorge Seferis1Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citron sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. They stopped in three p

5、laces along the way before reaching their final destination: first in Rhode Island, where the tall man with the black hair worked in a textile mill; then in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked for three months on a tractor assembly line; and finally in a small California town near the Mexican border,

6、where he pumped gas and worked at repairing small foreign cars with an amount of success that was, to him, surprising and gratifying.Wherever they stopped, he got a Maine newspaper called the Portland Press-Herald and watched it for items concerning a small southern Maine town named Jerusalems Lot a

7、nd the surrounding area. There were such items from time to time.He wrote an outline of a novel in motel rooms before they hit Central Falls, Rhode Island, and mailed it to his agent. He had been a mildly successful novelist a million years before, in a time when the darkness had not come over his l

8、ife. The agent took the outline to his last publisher, who expressed polite interest but no inclination to part with any advance money. Please and thank you, he told the boy as he tore the agents letter up, were still free. He said it without too much bitterness and set about the book anyway.The boy

9、 did not speak much. His face retained a perpetual pinched look, and his eyes were darkas if they always scanned some bleak inner horizon. In the diners and gas stations where they stopped along the way, he was polite and nothing more. He didnt seem to want the tall man out of his sight, and the boy

10、 seemed nervous even when the man left him to use the bathroom. He refused to talk about the town of Jerusalems Lot, although the tall man tried to raise the topic from time to time, and he would not look at the Portland newspapers the man sometimes deliberately left around.When the book was written

11、, they were living in a beach cottage off the highway, and they both swam in the Pacific a great deal. It was warmer than the Atlantic, and friendlier. It held no memories. The boy began to get very brown,Although they were living well enough to eat three square meals a day and keep a solid roof ove

12、r their heads, the man had begun to feel depressed and doubtful about the life they were living. He was tutoring the boy, and he did not seem to be losing anything in the way of education (the boy was bright and easy about books, as the tall man had been himself), but he didnt think that blotting sa

13、lems Lot out was doing the boy any good. Sometimes at night he screamed in his sleep and thrashed the blankets onto the floor.A letter came from New York. The tall mans agent said that Random House was offering $12,000 in advance, and a book club sale was almost certain. Was it okay?It was.The man q

14、uit his job at the gas station, and he and the boy crossed the border.2Los Zapatos, which means the shoes (a name that secretly pleased the man to no end), was a small village not far from the ocean. It was fairly free of tourists. There was no good road, no ocean view (you had to go five miles furt

15、her west to get that), and no historical points of interest. Also, the local cantina was infested with cockroaches and the only whore was a fifty-year-old grandmother.With the States behind them, an almost unearthly quiet dropped over their lives. Few planes went overhead, there were no turnpikes, a

16、nd no one owned a power lawn mower (or cared to have one) for a hundred miles. They had a radio, but even that was noise without meaning; the news broadcasts were all in Spanish, which the boy began to pick up but which remained - and always wouldgibberish to the man. All the music seemed to consist

17、 of opera. At night they sometimes got a pop music station from Monterey made frantic with the accents of Wolfman Jack but it faded in and out. The only motor within hearing distance was a quaint old Rototiller owned by a local farmer. When the wind was right, its irregular burping noise would come

18、to their ears faintly, like an uneasy spirit. They drew their water from the well by hand.Once or twice a month (not always together) they attended mass at the small church in town. Neither of them understood the ceremony, but they went all the same. The man found himself sometimes drowsing in the s

19、uffocating heat to the steady, familiar rhythms and the voices which gave them tongue. One Sunday the boy came out onto the rickety back porch where the man had begun work on a new novel and told him hesitantly that he had spoken to the priest about being taken into the church. The man nodded and as

20、ked him if he had enough Spanish to take instruction. The boy said he didnt think it would be a problem.The man made a forty-mile trip once a week to get the Portland, Maine, paper, which was always at least a week old and was sometimes yellowed with dog urine. Two weeks after the boy had told him o

21、f his intentions, he found a featured story about salems Lot and a Vermont town called Momson. The tall mans name was mentioned in the course of the story.He left the paper around with no particular hope that the boy would pick it up. The article made him uneasy for a number of reasons. It was not o

22、ver in salems Lot yet, it seemed.The boy came to him a day later with the paper in his hand, folded open to expose the headline: Ghost Town in Maine?Im scared, he said.I am, too, the tall man answered.3GHOST TOWN IN MAINE?By John LewisPress-Herald Features EditorJERUSALEMS LOTJerusalems Lot is a sma

23、ll town east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland. It is not the first town in American history to just dry up and blow away, and will probably not be the last, but it is one of the strangest. Ghost towns are common in the American Southwest, where communities grew up almost overnight ar

24、ound rich gold and silver lodes and then disappeared almost as rapidly when the veins of ore played out, leaving empty stores and hotels and saloons to rot emptily in desert silence.In New England the only counterpart to the mysterious emptying of Jerusalems Lot, or salems Lot as the natives often r

25、efer to it, seems to be a small town in Vermont called Momson. During the summer of 1923, Momson apparently just dried up and blew away, and all 312 residents went with it. The houses and few small business buildings in the towns center still stand, but since that summer fifty-two years ago, they ha

26、ve been uninhabited. In some cases the furnishings had been removed, but in most the houses were still furnished, as if in the middle of daily life some great wind had blown all the people away. In one house the table had been set for the evening meal, complete with a centerpiece of long-wilted flow

27、ers. In another the covers had been turned down neatly in an upstairs bedroom as if for sleep. In the local mercantile store, a rotted bolt of cotton cloth was found on the counter and a price of $1.22 rung up on the cash register. Investigators found almost $50.00 in the cash drawer, untouched.Peop

28、le in the area like to entertain tourists with the story and to hint that the town is hauntedthat, they say, is why it has remained empty ever since. A more likely reason is that Momson is located in a forgotten corner of the state, far from any main road. There is nothing there that could not be du

29、plicated in a hundred other towns except, of course, the Mary Celeste-like mystery of its sudden emptiness.Much the same could be said for Jerusalems Lot.In the census of 1970, salems Lot claimed 1,319 inhabitantsa gain of exactly 67 souls in the ten years since the previous census. It is a sprawlin

30、g, comfortable township, familiarly called the Lot by its previous inhabitants, where little of any note ever took place. The only thing the oldsters who regularly gathered in the park and around the stove in Crossens Agricultural Market had to talk about was the Fire of 51, when a carelessly tossed

31、 match started one of the largest forest fires in the states history.If a man wanted to spin out his retirement in a small country town where everyone minded his own business and the big event of any given week was apt to be the Ladies Auxiliary Bake-off, then the Lot would have been a good choice.

32、Demographically, the census of 1970 showed a pattern familiar both to rural sociologists and to the long-time resident of any small Maine town: a lot of old folks, quite a few poor folks, and a lot of young folks who leave the area with their diplomas under their arms, never to return again.But a li

33、ttle over a year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalems Lot that was not usual. People began to drop out of sight. The larger proportion of these, naturally, havent disappeared in the real sense of the word at all. The Lots former constable, Parkins Gillespie, is living with his sister in Kitt

34、ery. Charles James, owner of a gas station across from the drugstore, is now running a repair shop in neighboring Cumberland. Pauline Dickens has moved to Los Angeles, and Rhoda Curless is working with the St Matthews Mission in Portland. The list of undisappearances could go on and on.What is mysti

35、fying about these found people is their unanimous unwillingnessor inabilityto talk about Jerusalems Lot and what, if anything, might have happened there. Parkins Gillespie simply looked at this reporter, lit a cigarette, and said, I just decided to leave. Charles James claims he was forced to leave

36、because his business dried up with the town. Pauline Dickens, who worked as a waitress in the Excellent Caf6 for years, never answered this reporters letter of inquiry. And Miss Curless refuses to speak of salems Lot at all.Some of the missing can be accounted for by educated guesswork and a little

37、research. Lawrence Crockett, a local real estate agent who has disappeared with his wife and daughter, has left a number of questionable business ventures and land deals behind him, including one piece of Portland land speculation where the Portland Mall and Shopping Center is now under construction

38、. The Royce McDougalls, also among the missing, had lost their infant son earlier in the year and there was little to hold them in town. They might be anywhere. Others fit into the same category. According to State Police Chief Peter McFee, Weve got tracers out on a great many people from Jerusalems

39、 Lotbut that isnt the only Maine town where people have dropped out of sight. Royce McDougall, for instance, left owing money to one bank and two finance companies . . . in my judgment, he was just a fly-by-nighter who decided to get out from under. Someday this year or next, hell use one of those c

40、redit cards hes got in his wallet and the repossession men will land on him with both feet. In America missing persons are as natural as cherry pie. Were living in an automobile-oriented society. People pick up stakes and move on every two or three years. Sometimes they forget to leave a forwarding

41、address. Especially the deadbeats.Yet for all the hardheaded practicality of Captain McFees words, there are unanswered questions in Jerusalems Lot. Henry Petrie, and his wife and son are gone, and Mr Petrie, a Prudential Insurance Company executive, could hardly be called a deadbeat. The local mort

42、ician, the local librarian, and the local beautician are also in the dead-letter file. The list is of a disquieting length.In the surrounding towns the whispering campaign that is the beginning of legend has already begun. Salems Lot is reputed to be haunted. Sometimes colored lights are reported ho

43、vering over the Central Maine Power lines that bisect the township, and if you suggest that the inhabitants of the Lot have been carried off by UFOS, no one will laugh. There has been some talk of a dark coven of young people who were practicing the black mass in town and, perhaps, brought the wrath

44、 of God Himself on the namesake of the Holy Lands holiest city. Others, of a less supernatural bent, remember the young men who disappeared in the Houston, Texas, area some three years ago only to be discovered in grisly mass graves,An actual visit to salems Lot makes such talk seem less wild. There

45、 is not one business left open. The last one to go under was Spencers Sundries and Pharmacy, which closed its doors in January. Crossens Agricultural Store, the hardware store, Barlow and Strakers Furniture Shop, the Excellent Caf, and even the Municipal Building are all boarded up. The new grammar

46、school is empty, and so is the tri-town consolidated high school, built in the Lot in 1967. The school furnishings and the books have been moved to make-do facilities in Cumberland pending a referendum vote in the other towns of the school district, but it seems that no children from salems Lot will

47、 be in attendance when a new school year begins. There are no children; only abandoned shops and stores, deserted houses, overgrown lawns, deserted streets, and back roads.Some of the other people that the state police would like to locate or at least hear from include John Groggins, pastor of the J

48、erusalems Lot Methodist Church; Father Donald Callahan, Parish priest of St Andrews; Mabel Werts, a local widow who was prominent in salems Lot church and social functions; Lester and Harriet Durham, a local couple who both worked at Gates Mill and Weaving; Eva Miller, who ran a local boardinghouse.

49、 . . .4Two months after the newspaper article, the boy was taken into the church. He made his first confessionand confessed everything.5The village priest was an old man with white hair and a face seamed into a net of wrinkles. His eyes peered out of his sun-beaten face with surprising life and avidity. They were blue eyes, very Irish. When the tall man arrived at his house, he was sitting on the porch and drinking tea. A man in a city suit stood beside him. The mans hair was parted in the