Tookey and Booth search for the Lumley family

Tookey and Booth search for the Lumley family after a New Jersey driver follows instructions to take Jointner Avenue through Jerusalem’s Lot toward the 295 entrance ramp and becomes stranded in a blizzard. The rescue attempt is decisive because it exposes the danger still attached to the Lot: the Lumleys are not merely delayed motorists, and the apparently ordinary landscape conceals a threat that makes ordinary rescue procedures inadequate.

Discovery of the Threat

The sequence begins when the stranded driver identifies the route he was told to take and admits that the road looked drifted in, although he assumed that a town would have plows operating. Tookey immediately understands the implication. His near-whispered recognition of the Lot, followed by his instruction to Booth to telephone the sheriff, transforms the encounter from a traffic problem into an emergency. The driver’s confusion and insistence that nothing unusual has happened contrast with Tookey’s alarm; the visitor sees a blocked road, while the local men recognize a place associated with disappearances and supernatural danger.

Tookey and Booth nevertheless refuse to leave the stranded travelers outside. Booth acknowledges that they cannot simply abandon the Lumleys, and Tookey offers a practical solution: he will bring out his four-wheel-drive Scout. The decision establishes the action’s central conflict. Human responsibility demands a rescue, but the same obligation leads the men toward the Lot, where customary assumptions about safety, communication, and the whereabouts of the missing are no longer reliable.

The Journey Through the Blizzard

Tookey drives the Scout through the snowbank and onto Jointner Avenue, the road that passes through Jerusalem’s Lot and continues toward 295. Snow strikes the vehicle as the rear end slips, but Tookey controls it through experience, maneuvering and coaxing the vehicle onward. The headlights intermittently reveal the faint tire tracks left by the Lumleys’ car before the tracks disappear beneath the storm. The road therefore becomes both a physical route and a vanishing record: the rescuers can follow the family only while the snow permits the past to remain visible.

Before reaching the car, Tookey warns Lumley that local people are superstitious about the Lot. He offers a conditional explanation of the rescue: if the family is inside the vehicle, the men can bring everyone back to Tookey’s place and arrange to remove the car after the storm. If the family is not inside, however, the situation is fundamentally different. Tookey and Booth also instruct Lumley not to speak to anyone they might see, even if that person speaks first. The warning gives the search an explicit supernatural protocol before the evidence is fully visible, and it places the inexperienced visitor under the protection of men who understand more than they can safely explain.

The Abandoned Mercedes

The party finally reaches the back end of a large Mercedes. Its hood is buried in a snowdrift, another drift has sealed the entire left side, and yet the taillights remain illuminated while exhaust drifts from the tailpipe. The working engine makes the scene more disturbing rather than reassuring. The vehicle has not simply been abandoned because it ran out of fuel, and its continued operation suggests that the disappearance occurred while the family was still expected to be present.

The men leave the Scout and enter the wind. Lumley moves first toward the Mercedes, his topcoat blowing behind him, while Booth and Tookey follow. The headlights and taillights cast two shadows around him, a detail that makes the rescue scene visually unstable even before the missing people are found. When Lumley reaches the vehicle, Tookey grabs Booth and tells him to let Lumley go forward. The command restrains the rescuers at the crucial instant, reflecting both caution and the fear that approaching the car without preparation may expose them to the same danger.

Lumley opens the driver’s-side door and calls for Janey and Francie. The family does not answer. The vehicle is warm enough to be producing exhaust and sufficiently intact to retain its lights, but the people it should contain are gone. The ordinary signs of a functioning car remain while the human presence has been removed, creating the scene’s decisive reversal from rescue to disappearance.

The Tracks and the Unresolved Ending

Lumley runs after the missing family, and Tookey and Booth pursue him as quickly as the hip-deep snow allows. The storm makes the attempt painfully slow, but Lumley eventually stops and insists that he has found the route taken by his family. In a depression where the wind passes overhead, the men see two sets of tracks, one large and one small, already filling with snow. The tracks are nearly erased; had the rescuers arrived five minutes later, they would have vanished entirely.

The evidence confirms that the Lumleys left the Mercedes, but it does not explain why or where they went. Their disappearance is therefore represented through absence: the car remains, the exhaust continues, and the tracks briefly preserve the direction of flight before the weather destroys them. When Lumley begins to walk away with his head lowered, Tookey catches him and protests, attempting to prevent him from moving farther into the storm and whatever lies beyond the visible trail.

The search ends without recovering Janey or Francie. Its immediate result is not rescue but the exposure of a larger danger, and the incomplete tracks preserve the mystery rather than resolve it. Tookey and Booth’s conduct also gives the episode its moral shape: frightened and fully aware of the Lot’s reputation, they still choose to return for strangers. Their courage is practical rather than triumphant, expressed through a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a telephone call for official help, strict instructions about speech, and a willingness to enter the blizzard despite knowing that the missing may no longer be ordinary victims. The episode consequently extends Jerusalem’s Lot’s pattern of vanishing residents beyond the town’s familiar inhabitants and shows how quickly modern transportation and emergency procedure can become helpless before the town’s darkness.