Barlow and Straker's Furniture Shop

Barlow and Straker's Furniture Shop is the public face of Richard Throckett Straker and Kurt Barlow’s arrival in Jerusalem’s Lot. Its advertised purpose is respectable—fine furnishings and selected antiques—but its ownership, unexplained merchandise, and connection with the Marsten House make the shop a material instrument of the partners’ occupation of the town. It stands where the Village Washtub once operated, turning an abandoned everyday business into a new, carefully staged presence at the center of local life.

From the Village Washtub to a New Business

The shop begins as part of a package transaction arranged by Lawrence Crockett, the town’s second selectman and proprietor of Crockett’s Southern Maine Insurance and Realty. Parkins Gillespie reports that Larry Crockett had sold the Village Washtub, the old laundry, some time earlier. The property was not an isolated sale: Straker acquired both the commercial establishment and the Marsten House, binding the future shop to the town’s most ominous residence from the outset.

The location appealed to Straker because it was a block beyond the Town Office Building and fronted on the town park. When Straker approached Crockett, he did not browse the local property listings or make the ordinary gestures of a prospective buyer. He identified the business site directly, then named the residence he wanted as the Marsten House. His stated plan was that he and his partner would open a business in town and live in the house. The shop therefore formed one half of a coordinated arrangement: a public commercial address below and a private habitation above the town’s wooded edge.

Crockett’s sale was shaped by both money and coercion. The papers appeared legitimate at first, but the land supposedly connected to the proposed Portland shopping center had been purchased by Continental Land and Realty, a dummy company with empty offices, filing cabinets, and dust in a New York bank building. Straker’s promised inducement was immense, and he claimed that the property was worth four million and would soon be worth more. Crockett signed despite a deep unease, recognizing that he had abandoned his own rule, “You don’t shit where you eat.” By placing the Marsten House and the former laundry in Straker’s hands, he also placed himself at the beck and call of Straker and the absent Barlow.

The Shop’s Public Face

The business is introduced through a restrained announcement rather than an alarming one. Straker sends Crockett a brief note instructing him to have a poster mounted in the shop window. The poster states: “Opening in one week. Barlow and Straker. Fine furnishings. Selected antiques. Browsers welcome.” Its language is deliberately ordinary. The invitation to browsers gives the establishment the openness of a tourist business, while the names of both partners establish a commercial identity before either man becomes familiar to the town.

Crockett has Royal Snow put the poster up, and the announcement helps make the partners’ arrival visible without explaining it. The sign promises furnishings and antiques, not occult activity or danger; the shop can therefore enter the town through accepted habits of consumption. Jerusalem’s Lot is accustomed to gossip and surveillance through shared telephone lines, yet the information available to its residents remains superficial. The shop supplies a harmless explanation for the movements of Straker and Barlow even as the Marsten House, now occupied again, creates a thread of disquiet for those who notice the connection.

The business also fits the geography and social divisions of Jerusalem’s Lot. Brock Street crosses Jointner Avenue at right angles near the town’s center, while the southwest Bend is marked by trailers, junked cars, improvised yards, and Dell’s, a place associated with beer and fighting. Against this rougher commercial and residential landscape, the new store presents itself through imported furniture and antique expertise. Its polished public identity helps conceal the abnormality of its owners and makes the partners’ presence seem like an investment in the town’s ordinary future.

The Antique Shipment

The shop’s first substantial material presence arrives as a shipment unloaded at a warehouse. Boxes stand in the middle of the otherwise empty floor, making the collection appear portentous simply because nothing surrounds it. A sideboard is taller than the other pieces and is the only item not stamped “Barlow and Straker, 27 Jointner Avenue, Jer. Lot, Maine.” The furniture is thus marked as merchandise belonging to the new business, but the exceptional sideboard remains visually and bureaucratically distinct from the rest.

Royal Snow checks the boxes against an invoice and confirms that the shipment is complete. Most of the boxes carry regular customs stamps, while three have been shipped from within the United States. Royal names the inventory as he surveys it: a Polish rocking chair, a German clock, and a spinning wheel from Ireland. He assumes that tourists will buy such objects at high prices, while Hank Peters offers the practical explanation that visitors from Boston and New York will purchase almost anything presented as old. Their conversation reduces the shipment to a matter of retail speculation, but the assortment’s foreign origins and the sideboard’s exceptional status give the store an atmosphere that ordinary sales talk cannot dispel.

The unloading itself is uncomfortable. The warehouse smells of salt, wood rot, and wetness, and the workers think of rats. When Royal later returns to the new store, the back door is unlocked as Larry promised, but the lights do not work. In the darkness, an unpleasant odor rises—dry and acrid, like old corruption. These details make the furniture more than passive stock. The boxes have to be carried, counted, stamped, and positioned, yet their weight, smell, and unexplained irregularities shape the workers’ behavior, turning routine handling into reluctant participation in something they do not understand.

Connection with the Marsten House

The shop cannot be separated from the Marsten House. When Crockett sees a car shining in the driveway of the house, the sight causes a thread of disquiet because he knows that Straker is probably there. The same morning, he has received Straker’s note about the shop’s poster. The commercial opening and the residence’s reoccupation are therefore presented as simultaneous signs of a single operation rather than as independent developments.

Straker describes the enterprise as a perfectly ordinary furniture business with a line of special antiques for collectors, adding that his partner is an expert in the field. That explanation satisfies the surface logic of property investment and specialty retail, but it also identifies the shop as the instrument through which the partners can acquire a legitimate position in town. The Marsten House supplies secrecy, history, and isolation; the store supplies an address, customers, deliveries, and a reason for strangers and unusual objects to enter Jerusalem’s Lot.

The shop’s significance deepens as the town’s confidence in its own safety begins to fail. Jerusalem’s Lot believes that nothing too nasty can happen in such a nice little town, and its knowledge of national wars and crises remains largely academic. Against that complacent rhythm, the store is an intrusion that looks commercial before it looks supernatural. Its familiar function delays recognition of the danger: furniture can be displayed, antiques can be sold, and a poster can be placed in a window while the Marsten House becomes occupied and the partners’ plan takes hold.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

As an object and setting, Barlow and Straker's Furniture Shop embodies the conversion of ordinary infrastructure into a channel for evil. The former Village Washtub was associated with daily domestic labor; after the sale, the same commercial site becomes the branded outlet of strangers whose real purpose is concealed. The change is not merely architectural or economic. It alters what the town’s central space can mean, replacing a worn but intelligible local service with an imported display whose origins and operators remain obscure.

The store also dramatizes the tension between visible order and hidden corruption. Its poster promises “Fine furnishings,” “Selected antiques,” and welcome to browsers, while its initial shipment includes a singular sideboard, three internally shipped boxes, an unlocked rear entrance, failed lighting, and an odor of old decay. Each feature can be explained separately, but together they make the shop a threshold where commercial normality begins to reveal its material underside.

Finally, the shop helps map the spread of the partners’ influence through space. It occupies the town’s accessible public center, while the Marsten House stands on the last wooded hill in north Jerusalem. Goods move from a warehouse to the store; Straker’s car appears at the house; Crockett’s property deal links both sites; and the business announcement gives the newcomers a social identity. Before the town fully understands what has entered it, Barlow and Straker's Furniture Shop has already made that presence ordinary enough to be seen everywhere and strange enough to be feared nowhere.