Night Shift by Stephen King Page A

century, a Force which has slain my ancestors and taken them in unholy bondage as
nosferatu
—the Undead. And I have greater fears than these, Bones, but I still see only in part. If I knew . . . if I only knew all!
    CHARLES .
    Postscriptum
—And of course I write this only for myself; we are isolated from Preacher's Corners. I daren't carry my taint there to post this, and Calvin will not leave me. Perhaps, if God is good, this will reach you in some manner.
    C.

    (From the pocket journal of Calvin McCann)

    Oct. 23, '50
    He is stronger to-day; we talked briefly of the
apparitions
in the cellar; agreed they were neither hallucinations or of an
ectoplasmic
origin, but
real.
Does Mr. Boone suspect as I do, that they have gone? Perhaps; the noises are still; yet all is ominous yet, o'ercast with a dark pall. It seems we wait in the deceptive Eye of the Storm . . .
    Have found a packet of papers in an upstairs bedroom, lying in the bottom drawer of an old roll-top desk. Some correspondence & receipted bills lead me to believe the room was Robert Boone's. Yet the most interesting document is a few jottings on the back of an advertisement for gentlemen's beaver hats. At the top is writ:

    Blessed are the meek.

    Below, the following apparent nonsense is writ:

    bke dshdermthes eak
elmsoerare shamded

    I believe 'tis the key of the locked and coded book in the library. The cypher above is certainly a rustic one used in the War for Independence known as the
Fence-Rail.
When one removes the “nulls” from the second bit of scribble, the following is obtained:

    besdrteek
lseaehme

    Read up and down rather than across, the result is the original quotation from the Beatitudes.
    Before I dare show this to Mr. Boone, I must be sure of the book's contents . . .

    Oct. 24, 1850.
    DEAR BONES ,
    An amazing occurrence—Cal, always close-mouthed until absolutely sure of himself [a rare and admirable human trait!], has found the diary of my grandfather Robert. The document was in a code which Cal himself has broken. He modestly declares that the discovery was an accident, but I suspect that perseverance and hard work had rather more to do with it.
    At any rate, what a somber light it sheds on our mysteries here!
    The first entry is dated June 1, 1789, the last October 27, 1789—four days before the cataclysmic disappearance of which Mrs. Cloris spoke. It tells a tale of deepening obsession—nay, of madness—and makes hideously clear the relationship between Great-uncle Philip, the town of Jerusalem's Lot, and the book which rests in that desecrated church
    The town itself, according to Robert Boone, pre-dates Chapelwaite (built in 1782) and Preacher's Corners (known in those days as Preacher's Rest and founded in 1741); it was founded by a splinter group of the Puritan faith in 1710, a sect headed by a dour religious fanatic named James Boon. What a start that name gave me! That this Boon bore relation to my family can hardly be doubted, I believe. Mrs. Cloris could not have been more right in her superstitious belief that familial bloodline is of crucial importance in this matter; and I recall with terror her answer to my question about Philip and
his
relationship to 'Salem's Lot. “Blood relation,” said she, and I fear that it is so.
    The town became a settled community built around the church where Boon preached—or held court. My grandfather intimates that he also held commerce with any number of ladies from the town, assuring them that this was God's way and will. As a result, the town became an anomaly which could only have existed in those isolated and queer days when belief in witches and the Virgin Birth existed hand in hand: an interbred, rather degenerate religious village controlled by a half-mad preacher whose twin gospels were the Bible and de Goudge's sinister
Demon Dwellings;
a community in which rites of exorcism were held regularly; a community of incest and the insanity and physical