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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 26 из 359Seward, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morris-enter the basement of Carfax, the Count's English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martials a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals-cats, rats, weasels ( and possibly Republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time.
Lord Godalming is ready for this, however. He lets a couple of terriers out of a bag, and they make short work of the Count's rats. I decided I would let Barlow-my version of Count Dracula-also use the rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem's Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel, and to this day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what.
Actually, I used them to create a scene so revolting that my editor at Doubleday (the same Bill Thompson mentioned in the forenote to this volume) suggested strongly that I remove it and substitute something else. After some grousing, I complied with his wishes. In the Doubleday/New American Library editions of 'Salem's Lot , Jimmy Cody, a local doctor, and Mark Petrie, the boy accompanying him, discover that the king vampire-to use Van Helsing's pungent term-is almost certainly denning in the basement of a local boarding house. Jimmy begins to go downstairs, but the stairs have been cut away and the floor beneath littered with knives pounded through boards. Jimmy Cody dies impaled upon these knives in a scene of what I would call "horror"-as opposed to "terror” or "revulsion," the scene is a middle-of-the-roader.
In the first draft manuscript, however, I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover-too late-that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller's boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms.
When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming.
Lord Godalming is ready for this, however. He lets a couple of terriers out of a bag, and they make short work of the Count's rats. I decided I would let Barlow-my version of Count Dracula-also use the rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem's Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel, and to this day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what.
Actually, I used them to create a scene so revolting that my editor at Doubleday (the same Bill Thompson mentioned in the forenote to this volume) suggested strongly that I remove it and substitute something else. After some grousing, I complied with his wishes. In the Doubleday/New American Library editions of 'Salem's Lot , Jimmy Cody, a local doctor, and Mark Petrie, the boy accompanying him, discover that the king vampire-to use Van Helsing's pungent term-is almost certainly denning in the basement of a local boarding house. Jimmy begins to go downstairs, but the stairs have been cut away and the floor beneath littered with knives pounded through boards. Jimmy Cody dies impaled upon these knives in a scene of what I would call "horror"-as opposed to "terror” or "revulsion," the scene is a middle-of-the-roader.
In the first draft manuscript, however, I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover-too late-that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller's boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms.
When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming.