Needful Things (35 page)

Polly, this is not a question of what belongs to the town, and you know it. It's a question of what belongs to Alan.

She shook her head back and forth as she sat in the rocker, completely unaware she was making this gesture of negation. She supposed she had spent too many sleepless three o'clocks on too many endless dark mornings to give away her inner landscape without a fight. In time she would tell Alan everything—she had not meant to keep the complete truth a secret even this long—but the time wasn't yet. Surely not . . . especially when her hands were telling her that in the next few days she would not be able to think about much of anything at all except them.

The phone began to ring. That would be Alan, back from patrol and checking in with her. Polly got up and crossed the room to it. She picked it up carefully, using both hands, ready to tell him the things she believed he wanted to hear. Aunt Evvie's voice tried to intrude, tried to tell her this was bad behavior, childishly self-indulgent behavior, perhaps even dangerous behavior. Polly pushed that voice aside quickly and roughly.

“Hello?” she said brightly. “Oh, hi, Alan! How are you? Good.”

She listened briefly, then smiled. If she had looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror, she would have seen a woman who appeared to be screaming . . . but she did not look.

“Fine, Alan,” she said. “I'm just fine.”

It was almost time to leave for the Raceway.

Almost.

“Come on,” Danforth Keeton whispered. Sweat ran down his face like oil. “Come on, come on,
come on.”

He was sitting hunched over Winning Ticket—he had swept everything off his desk to make room for it, and he had spent most of the day playing with it. He had started with his copy of
Bluegrass History: Forty Years of Kentucky Derby.
He had run at least two dozen Derbys, giving the tin Winning Ticket horses the names of the entrants in exactly the manner Mr. Gaunt had described. And the tin horses which got the names of the winning Derby horses from the book kept coming in first. It happened time after time. It was amazing—so amazing that it was four o'clock before he realized that he had spent the day running long-ago races when there were ten brand-new ones to be run at Lewiston Raceway that very evening.

Money was waiting to be made.

For the last hour, today's Lewiston
Daily Sun,
folded to the racing card, had lain to the left of the Winning Ticket board. To the right was a sheet of paper he had torn from his pocket notebook. Listed on the sheet in Keeton's large, hasty scrawl was this:

It was only five in the afternoon, but Danforth Keeton was already running the last race of the night. The horses rattled and swayed around the track. One of them led by six lengths, and crossed the finish line far ahead of the others.

Keeton snatched up the newspaper and studied the evening's
Raceway card again. His face shone so brightly that he looked sanctified. “Malabar!” he whispered, and shook his fists in the air. The pencil caught in one of them darted and plunged like a runaway sewing needle. “It's Malabar! Thirty-to-one! Thirty-to-one
at least!
Malabar, by God!”

He scribbled on the sheet of paper, panting raggedly as he did so. Five minutes later the Winning Ticket game was locked in his study closet and Danforth Keeton was on his way to Lewiston in his Cadillac.

At quarter to ten on Sunday morning, Nettie Cobb drew on her coat and buttoned it swiftly. An expression of grim determination was stamped on her face. She was standing in her kitchen. Raider was sitting on the floor, looking up at her as if to ask if she really meant to go through with it this time.

“Yes, I really mean it,” she told him.

Raider thumped his tail against the floor, as if to say he knew she could do it.

“I've made a nice lasagna for Polly, and I'm going to take it to her. My lampshade is locked up in the armoire, and I
know
it's locked, I don't need to keep coming back to check because I know it in my
head.
That crazy Polish woman isn't going to keep me prisoner in my own house. If I see her on the street, I'll give her what-for! I warned her!”

She
had
to go out. She
had
to, and she knew it. She hadn't left the house in two days, and she had come to realize that the longer she put it off, the harder it would become. The longer she sat in the living room with the shades pulled down, the harder it would get to ever raise them again. She could feel the old confused terror creeping into her thoughts.

So she had gotten up early this morning—at five o'clock!—and had made a nice lasagna for Polly, just the way she liked it, with plenty of spinach and mushrooms. The mushrooms were canned, because she hadn't dared go
out to the market last night, but she thought it had turned out very well despite that. It was now sitting on the counter, the top of the pan covered with aluminum foil.

She picked it up and marched through the living room to the door. “You be a good boy, Raider. I'll be back in an hour. Unless Polly gives me coffee, and then it might be a little longer. But I'll be fine. I don't have a thing to worry about. I didn't do anything to that crazy Polish woman's sheets, and if she bothers me, I'll give her the very dickens.”

Raider uttered a stern bark to show he understood and believed.

She opened the door, peeked out, saw nothing. Ford Street was as deserted as only a small-town street can be early on Sunday morning. In the distance, one church-bell was calling Rev. Rose's Baptists to worship and another was summoning Father Brigham's Catholics.

Gathering all her courage, Nettie stepped out into the Sunday sunshine, set the pan of lasagna down on the step, pulled the door closed, and locked it. Then she took her housekey and scratched it up her forearm, leaving a thin red mark. As she stooped to pick up the pan again she thought,
Now when you get halfway down the block—maybe even sooner—you'll start thinking that you really didn't lock the door after all. But you did. You set the lasagna down to do it. And if you still can't believe it, just look at your arm and remember that you made that scratch with your very own housekey
 . . . after
you used it to lock the house. Remember that, Nettie, and you'll be just fine when the doubts start to creep in.

This was a wonderful thought, and using the key to scratch her arm had been a wonderful idea. The red mark was something
concrete,
and for the first time in the last two days (and mostly sleepless nights), Nettie really
did
feel better. She marched down to the sidewalk, her head high, her lips pressed together so tightly that they almost disappeared. When she reached the sidewalk, she looked both ways for the crazy Polish woman's little yellow car. If she saw it, she intended to walk right up to it and tell the crazy Polish woman to leave her alone. There wasn't a sign of it, though. The only vehicle in sight was an old orange truck parked up the street, and it was empty.

Good.

Nettie set sail for Polly Chalmers's house, and when the doubts assailed her, she remembered that the carnival glass lampshade was locked up, Raider was on guard, and the front door was locked. Especially that last. The front door was locked, and she only had to look at the fading red mark on her arm to prove it to herself.

So Nettie marched on with her head high, and when she reached the corner, she turned it without looking back.

When the nutty woman was out of sight, Hugh Priest sat up behind the wheel of the orange town truck he had drawn from the deserted motor pool at seven that morning (he had lain down on the seat as soon as he saw Crazy Nettie come out the door). He put the gearshift in neutral, and let the truck roll slowly and soundlessly down the slight grade to Nettie Cobb's house.

The doorbell woke Polly from a soupy state that wasn't really sleep but a kind of dream-haunted drug-daze. She sat up in bed and realized she was wearing her housecoat. When had she put it on? For a moment she couldn't remember, and that frightened her. Then it came. The pain she'd been expecting had arrived right on schedule, easily the worst arthritic pain of her entire life. It had awakened her at five. She had gone into the bathroom to urinate, then had discovered she couldn't even get a swatch of toilet paper off the roll to blot herself with. So she had taken a pill, put on her housecoat, and sat in the chair by the bedroom window to wait until it worked. At some point she must have gotten sleepy and gone back to bed.

Her hands felt like crude ceramic figures baked until they were on the verge of cracking. The pain was both hot and cold, set deep in her flesh like complex networks of
poisoned wires. She held her hands up despairingly, scarecrow hands, awful, deformed hands, and downstairs the doorbell chimed again. She uttered a distracted little cry.

She went out onto the landing with her hands held out in front of her like the paws of a dog sitting up to beg a sweet. “Who is it?” she called down. Her voice was hoarse, gummy with sleep. Her tongue tasted like something which had been used to line a cat-box.

“It's Nettie!” The voice drifted back up. “Are you okay, Polly?”

Nettie. Good God, what was Nettie doing here before the crack of dawn on Sunday morning?

“I'm fine!” she called back. “I have to put something on! Use your key, dear!”

When she heard Nettie's key begin to rattle in the lock, Polly hurried back into her bedroom. She glanced at the clock on the table beside her bed and saw that dawn had cracked several hours before. Nor had she come back to put something on; her housecoat would do for Nettie just fine. But she needed a pill. She had never, never in her life, needed a pill as badly as she did now.

She didn't know how bad her condition really was until she tried to take one. The pills—actually caplets—were in a small glass dish on the mantel of the room's ornamental fireplace. She was able to get her hand into the dish all right, but found herself completely unable to grasp one of the caplets once it was there. Her fingers were like the pincers of some machine which had frozen solid for lack of oil.

She tried harder, concentrating all of her will on making her fingers close upon one of the gelatine capsules. She was rewarded with slight movement and a great burst of agony. That was all. She made a little muttering sound of pain and frustration.

“Polly?” From the foot of the stairs now, Nettie's voice was concerned. People in Castle Rock might consider Nettie vague, Polly thought, but when it came to the vicissitudes of Polly's infirmity, Nettie was not vague at all. She had been around the house too long to be fooled . . . and had loved her too well. “Polly, are you really all right?”

“Be right down, dear!” she called back, trying to
sound bright and lively. And as she took her hand out of the glass dish and bent her head over it, she thought,
Please, God. Don't let her come up now. Don't let her see me doing this.

She lowered her face into the dish like a dog about to drink from its bowl and stuck out her tongue. Pain, shame, horror, and most of all a dark depression, all maroons and grays, enfolded her. She pressed her tongue against one of the caplets until it stuck. She drew it into her mouth, now not a dog but an anteater ingesting a tasty morsel, and swallowed.

As the pill traced its tiny hard trail down her throat, she thought again:
I would give anything to be free of this. Anything. Anything at all.

Hugh Priest rarely dreamed anymore; these days he did not go to sleep so much as fall unconscious. But he'd had a dream last night, a real lulu. The dream had told him everything he had to know, and everything he was supposed to do.

In it he had been sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a beer and watching a game-show called
Sale of the Century.
All the things they were giving away were things he had seen in that shop, Needful Things. And all of the contestants were bleeding from their ears and the corners of their eyes. They were laughing, but they looked terrified.

All at once a muffled voice began to call, “Hugh! Hugh! Let me out, Hugh!”

It was coming from the closet. He went over and opened it, ready to coldcock whoever was hiding inside. But there was no one; only the usual tangle of boots, scarves, coats, fishing tackle, and his two shotguns.

“Hugh!”

He looked up, because the voice was coming from the shelf.

It was the fox-tail. The fox-tail was talking. And Hugh recognized the voice at once. It was the voice of Leland
Gaunt. He had taken the brush down, revelling again in its plushy softness, a texture that was a little like silk, a little like wool, and really like nothing at all but its own secret self.

“Thanks, Hugh,” the fox-tail said. “It's really stuffy in here. And you left an old pipe on the shelf. It really stinks. Whew!”

“Did you want to go to another place?” Hugh had asked. He felt a little stupid talking to a fox-tail, even in a dream.