Two more deleted scenes from the first draft are as follows:
In Chapter 12 (Mark), both Mark and Susan explore the Marsten House, plotting to kill Barlow. However, in the published novel, the house is still a shambles when Susan peers in the window. In the original manuscript, there has been some renovation, detailed below:
She peered in through the break in the shutters. ‘Wow,’ she murmured.
‘What is it?’ he asked anxiously. Even standing on tiptoe, he wasn’t quite tall enough to peer in.
She tried stumblingly to explain. Of course, neither of them knew that Parker [Larry] Crockett, feeling more and more like a man in the devil’s power, had been acting on Straker’s orders – orders that unvaryingly specified pickup and delivery after dark. The invoices and bills of lading were always correct to the final letter, and payment was always to be made in cash – and Straker calculated with devilish accuracy, including sums for tipping porters and drivers. Drivers were hard to find, also. The harried Crockett found himself having to cast further and further afield for haulers and he found none that would do the job more than once. Royal Snow had laughed in his face and said, ‘I wouldn’t go back to that hell-house for a million bucks. Not if you drove the million up to my back door in a pickup. Get someone else.’
The triumph of owning the hot property downstate had even gone a bit sour in his mouth. Looking at the duly-executed papers in his safe-deposit box somehow didn’t compensate for the looks on the country-boys’ faces when they came into his office to collect Straker’s money. Parker knew that some of the deliveries were paintings – even when crated and covered with brown paper, the shape and feel of a painting was unmistakable. He suspected that the other crates, some of them picked up at the Portland docks, some at the Gates Falls railhead, contained furniture.
On Friday evening, the two men Parker had hired from Harlow had not returned – instead, Straker had shown up, driving the U-Haul.
‘Where are those two guys?’ Parker had asked. ‘I got their money . . .’ He indicated the sealed white envelopes with a finger that shook slightly. Straker made that happen, damn him. For the first time in his long and not-so-straight business life, Parker Crockett felt manipulated, and he did not like it.
‘They were curious,’ Straker said, smiling his wolfish smile.
‘Like Bluebeard’s wife.’
‘Where are they?’ Parker asked again, aware that he was afraid Straker might tell him the truth.
‘I’ve paid them,’ Straker said. ‘You needn’t worry. You can keep that, if you like,’ he added carelessly. There was two hundred dollars in each envelope.
Parker said deliberately: ‘If the State Police or Homer McCaslin shows up here, I want you to know I’m not going to cover up a goddamned thing. You’ve exceeded our agreement.’
Straker had thrown back his head and roared out his humorless, black laughter. ‘You are a precious man, Mr Crockett. Precious. You needn’t fear the authorities. Indeed, no.’ The mockery of humor disappeared from his face like a dream. ‘If you must fear anything, fear your own curiosity. Do not be like those two dirt-grubbers tonight . . . or Bluebeard’s wife. There is a saying in our country: he who knows little is a sparrow; and the sparrows abide.’
And Parker Crockett asked no more questions. His daughter was sick in bed, and he asked no questions about that, either.
Looking through those dusty, broken slats was like looking through a science fiction time-lens into some stately Victorian mansion after the family had gone to Brighton for the summer. The walls were covered with a heavy, silken paper, wine colored. Several wing chairs stood about, and a deep green velour sofa. In the alcove just off the main living room she could see a huge mahogany rolltop desk. Over it, in a heavily-scrolled frame, was a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Boy at his Studies – of course, it had to be a reproduction, didn’t it?
Sliding doors, half-open, fronted the hallway that led past the stairwell and down toward the kitchen where Hubert Marsten’s wife had met her end. In the passage’s brown depths, she could see the crystal glimmer of a chandelier.
She stepped away fighting an urge to rub her eyes. It was so unlike the Marsten House of town rumor, or the stories passed from mouth to horrified mouth around the Girl Scout campfires that it was almost indecent. And all the changes had been made invisibly, it seemed.
‘What is it?’ Mark hissed again. ‘Is it him?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The house, it . . . it’s been redone,’ she finished lamely.
‘Sure,’ he said, in perfect understanding. ‘They like to have all their stuff. Why shouldn’t they?
They’ve got tons of money and gold.’
She boosted herself up with a smooth flex of her muscles, and suddenly thought of Ben telling her about the hoods who had stuck up John Stennis: We’re going to shoot you anyway. She dropped lightly to the carpet, which was smooth and soft and deep. Across the room, a grandfather clock with its wonderfully convoluted works in an oblong glass case, ticked away the minutes. The highly polished pendulum made a sunstreak on the opposing wall. There was an open humidor by one of the wing chairs, and beside it, an old-looking book with a calfskin binding. A black satin bookmark was placed into it perhaps three quarters of the way through. The overhead light fixture was a wonderfully convoluted thing composed of oblique prisms.
There were no mirrors in the room.
‘Hey,’ Mark hissed. His hands waved above the windowsill. ‘Help me get up.’
She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he could catch a grip on the sill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped to the carpet, and then the house was still again.
They found themselves listening to the silence, fascinated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum in the ears that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve-endings idling in neutral.
There was only a great dead soundlessness. And that wasn’t right because—
She looked wildly across the room.
The clock had stopped. The pendulum hung straight down.
The cellar door was standing ajar.
‘That’s where we have to go,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said weakly. ‘Oh.’
The door was open just a crack, and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick at the kitchen, hungrily, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
Then he moved forward and pulled the door open, and she felt her legs fall in behind him.
His fingers found a light switch and thumbed it back and forth several times.
‘Busted,’ he muttered. ‘ That’s no surprise.’ He reached into his back pocket and brought out a greasy, crooked candle that had been slightly flattened by its trip in Mark’s back pocket. He turned to her and made himself offer: ‘Look, maybe you better stay up here and keep a watch out for Straker.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m coming.’
It did not occur to either of them that the time had come to go back, to get Ben and perhaps even Jimmy Cody, to come back here with powerful eight-cell flashlights and shotguns. They were beyond reality; they had gone around the bend that so many discuss so lightly at parties where the electric lights are on and shadows are kept sensibly under tables and locked in closets.
He lit the candle and they went through the door.
The throat of the stairway was narrow stone, the steps themselves dusty and old. The candle flame danced and fluttered in the noisome exhalation from below.
Now she heard something: the faint whisk and patter of many small feet. She pressed her lips together to still the sound that wanted to come between them – it might have been a scream.
‘Rats,’ he said. ‘You scared of rats?’
‘No,’ she lied.
They went down.
She counted the steps – thirteen of them. Didn’t they say that the old English gallows had thirteen steps? Only of course that was going up, not down.
(Ben had mentioned Psycho, what was that line from the book, not Hitchcock’s movie? You’ve made your grave and now you have to lie in it. Only it wasn’t a grave, it was a bed. Or Poe: My God, I had walled the monster up in the tomb! Or nameless hoodlums on a Washington, D.C. street: We’re going to kill you anyway.)
They stepped on the hard-packed earth floor, and Mark held the candle up. The ceiling was low; the top of Susan’s head nearly brushed the cobwebby beams. In the glow of the candle they could see moving shadows in the darkness, and every now and again the ruby glint of an eye. There was an old table covered by a piece of oilcloth, and beside it stood an opened crate, with aluminum retaining bands snapped. The smell of rot and putridity was thick in the throat, nearly overwhelming.
‘Take your cross in your hand,’ he said.
She fumbled it out of her blouse and held it tightly. Closed in her fist, it seemed to be the only warmth in a cold world. She began to feel a little better, a little comforted. She looked down at her tightly curled hand and saw a faint, luminous glow escaping between her fingers in rays.
‘It’s glowing,’ she whispered.
‘Yes. We don’t have to worry about the rats. Come on. This way.’
They began to walk forward, single file, toward the long southern spread of the cellar. She could see that it took an L-turn up ahead, and knew that whatever they had come for would reach its culmination beyond that turn. She looked aside and felt her blood cool in her veins.
The rats were everywhere, seemingly millions of them, two and three deep, squirming over each other in their eagerness. She saw some as big as small cats. Their beady eyes stared at them with cold impudence. They had left a small pathway for them, about two feet across, and were closing in behind them as the Red Sea had closed behind Moses.
One of them darted forward and nipped at Mark’s foot and without thought she thrust her crucifix at it, hissing. The rat squealed and scrabbled off into the darkness, a brown elastic sock fiber hanging from its jaw.
They stopped at the cellar’s elbow-bend. ‘Remember,’ he told her. ‘Don’t look at his eyes. No matter what happens.’
‘Yes . . . all right.’
He took her hand again. ‘I’m scared,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t ever do this again.’
‘It’s too late to go back, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I . . . I think it is.’
‘Then go on, Mark. We’ll do what we have to.’ She was stunned by the calmness which seemed to flow from her own voice.
They were around the corner, and a warm carrion breeze immediately whiffed out the candle, plunging them into utter, womblike darkness. She screamed; was unable to help it. In her ears was the sound of the rats, squeaking and rustling and drawing closer with tenebrous eagerness.
‘Hold your cross up!’ Mark shouted.
She did.
Its glow spilled forth with an effulgent, unearthly radiance that was brighter by far than the candle that now lay at Mark’s feet. It spilled off these crumbled brick walls with a frosty luminescence which was deeply comforting. The rats squealed and scampered.
Mark, also holding up his cross, was looking around. ‘Judas Priest!’ he muttered.
Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Susan thought. They stood at the mouth of what must once have been an extensive wine cellar (Poe again: For the love of God, Montressor—!), full of casks covered with dust and cobwebs, and lined with crisscrossing wine holders. From some of these, ancient magnums still peeked forth. Some of them had popped their corks, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some discerning palate, the spider now made his home.
Others would have turned to vinegar. Still others might be good, still waiting . . . waiting for . . .
She shifted her eyes up. The wine cellar opened out to an underground dais, freshly hung with circular velvet drapes. Unlit black tapers stood about. On the far wall, a cross with broken arms hung upside down. Obscene statues stood to either side of the main podium – and on it rested a huge coffin of banded oak, and on top of it was an embossed coat of arms with a wolf rampant, and one word:
SARLINOV.
This was it, then. True – all true. The word echoed dismally into the depths of her mind, as if through channels of fog. She felt waves of faintness sweep over her, and her cross wavered. She felt frozen in indecision, unable to move. It would be so much simpler, so blessed, to just wait here . . . wait here until the world turned into his nighted sphere above them.
‘Now!’ Mark shouted at her. ‘Now!’
‘No,’ she whispered weakly. ‘I can’t. Let me alone.’ The scene wavered and danced in front of her eyes, as if seen from behind a burning haze of heat. The statues which flanked the coffin, statues she faintly recognized as the Holy Family in unthinkable postures, seemed to writhe and move.
‘Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .’ he began.
‘No . . . no . . .’
His hand flashed out, and her head rocked back. One eye watered and twitched.
This section is from Father Callahan’s chapter, when he is talking to Matt Burke. This scene was omitted from the final novel but still carries peripheral interest.
‘I’m not going to say no, not at this point,’ Callahan said. ‘But I want you to understand my position. Let me make three points, and then I’ll ask you if you have changed your mind. Agreed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. One: During the black plague which covered Europe during the Middle Ages, vampire hysteria was roughly equal to the flying saucer hysteria of a few years ago in this country. People in many cases observed the unquiet dead writhing on the carts of the dead-wagons that went through the streets, collecting plague victims, and in many cases, a traveller passing a cemetery would see a hand clawing up through the earth, followed by the mud-clotted, wild-eyed face of what the illiterate, frightened “man-in-the-street” of the day quite reasonably took to be an Undead. In the countries of Eastern Europe, the peasants recently converted to Catholicism besieged their priests, begging them to do something about the vampires that were abroad in the countryside. Most priests had never heard of such a thing, but were loath to admit it. Many of them, therefore, blessed the rite of vampire-killing forthwith. Are you following?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then imagine you are Joe Smithov, a typical Romanian peasant. You are stricken with the black plague, and for two weeks you thrash in a delirium of fever. At last it breaks, and you plunge down into a cooling, restorative unconsciousness. At this point you are pronounced dead by an unlettered country quack who held a mirror in front of your mouth for four seconds and then felt for your pulse by pressing his ear to your stomach. Still unconscious, you are piled into a rude coffin by frightened relatives, and carried to the local graveyard, where you are buried in a shallow pit. Later, you awake to the horror of all horrors: buried alive! Perhaps you scream. Perhaps you are able to pull away one of the boards and thrust an arm up through the loose earth, waving wildly. And then . . . blessed rescue! You hear the shovels, then see the good light of day again. Instead of stale air, the fresh, sweet breeze of God’s heaven. And then . . . what’s this? A delegation with an ash stake, tied with ceremonial red ribbons. Two men hold you down, screaming and begging. A third places the stake against your chest. A fourth holds a mallet, ready to send your blood-sucking soul back to Father Satan. And behind this delegation, who should you see with your dying gaze but the village priest, reading the rite of exorcism and sprinkling everything in sight with holy water! Fade out. Not pretty, is it?’
‘No.’
‘The church is desperately ashamed of the whole episode – they use it as a case in point whenever someone in its body shows a sign of jumping to conclusions – of proceeding on the basis of two hundred years’ study rather than five hundred.’
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