Needful Things (79 page)

Sean felt his crotch grow wet and warm. He had never been so scared in his life. “Brian, please!
Pleeease!”

“I want you to promise me you'll never go to the new store,” Brian said. “Do you hear me?”

Sean took a step toward his brother. Brian's toe tightened on the trigger of the rifle.

“No!”
Sean screamed, drawing back at once. “I mean yes!
Yes!
”

Brian let the barrel drop a little when he saw his brother retreat. His toe relaxed a bit. “Promise me.”

“
Yes
! Anything you want! Only don't do that! Don't . . . don't tease me anymore, Bri! Let's go in and watch
The Transformers!
No . . .
you
pick! Anything you want! Even Wapner! We can watch Wapner if you want to! All week! All
month!
I'll watch with you! Only stop scaring me, Brian,
please stop scaring me!”

Brian Rusk might not have heard. His eyes seemed to float in his distant, serene face.

“Never go there,” he said. “Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he's really not a man, Sean. He's not a man at all. Swear to me you'll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells.”

“I swear! I swear!” Sean babbled. “I swear on Mommy's name!”

“No,” Brian said, “you can't do that, because he got her, too. Swear on your
own
name, Sean. Swear it on your very own name.”

“I do!” Sean cried out in the hot, dim garage. He
held his hands out imploringly to his brother. “I really do, I swear on my very own name! Now please put the gun down, Bri—”

“I love you, baby brother.” He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. “Sandy Koufax sucks,” Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe.

Sean's drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.

Leland Gaunt stood at his shop window, looking out on Main Street and smiling gently. The sound of the shot from up on Ford Street was faint, but his ears were sharp and he heard it.

His smile broadened a little.

He took down the sign in the window, the one which said he was open by appointment only, and put up a new one. This one read

CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

“We're having fun now,” Leland Gaunt said to no one at all. “Yessirree.”

Polly Chalmers know nothing of these things.

While Castle Rock was bearing the first real fruits of Mr. Gaunt's labors, she was out at the end of Town Road #3, at the old Camber place. She had gone there as soon as she had finished her conversation with Alan.

Finished it? she thought. Oh my dear, that's much too civilized. After you hung up on him—isn't that what you mean?

All right, she agreed. After I hung up on him. But he went behind my back. And when I called him on it, he got all flustered and then lied about it. He
lied
about it. I happen to think that behavior like that
deserves
an uncivilized response.

Something stirred uneasily in her at this, something which might have spoken if she had given it time and room, but she gave it neither. She wanted no dissenting voices; did not, in fact, want to think about her last conversation with Alan Pangborn at all. She just wanted to take care of her business out here at the end of Town Road #3 and then go back home. Once she was there, she intended to take a cool bath and then go to bed for twelve or sixteen hours.

That deep voice managed just five words: But, Polly . . . have you thought—

No. She hadn't. She supposed she would have to think in time, but now was too soon. When the thinking began,
the hurting would begin, too. For now she only wanted to take care of business . . . and not think at all.

The Camber place was spooky . . . reputed by some to be haunted. Not so many years ago, two people—a small boy and Sheriff George Bannerman—had died in the dooryard of this house. Two others, Gary Pervier and Joe Camber himself, had died just down the hill. Polly parked her car over the place where a woman named Donna Trenton had once made the fatal mistake of parking her Ford Pinto, and got out. The
azka
swung back and forth between her breasts as she did.

She looked around uneasily for a moment at the sagging porch, the paintless walls overrun by climbing ivy, the windows which were mostly broken and stared blindly back at her. Crickets sang their stupid songs in the grass, and the hot sun beat down as it had on those terrible days when Donna Trenton had fought for her life here, and for the life of her son.

What am I doing here?
Polly thought.
What in God's name am I doing here?

But she knew, and it had nothing to do with Alan Pangborn or Kelton or the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare. This little field-trip had nothing to do with love. It had to do with pain. That was all . . . but that was enough.

There was something inside the small silver charm. Something that was alive. If she did not live up to her side of the bargain she had made with Leland Gaunt, it would die. She didn't know if she could stand to be tumbled back down into the horrible, grinding pain to which she had awakened on Sunday morning. If she had to face a lifetime of such pain, she thought she would kill herself.

“And it's not Alan,” she whispered as she walked toward the barn with its gaping doorway and its ominous swaybacked roof. “He said he wouldn't raise a hand against him.”

Why do you even care? that worrisome voice whispered.

She cared because she didn't want to hurt Alan. She was angry at him, yes—
furious,
in fact—but that didn't mean she had to stoop to his level, that she had to treat
him
as shabbily he had treated her.

But, Polly . . . have you thought—

No.
No!

She was going to play a trick on Ace Merrill, and she didn't care about Ace at all—had never even met him, only knew him by reputation. The trick was on Ace, but . . .

But Alan, who had sent Ace Merrill away to Shawshank, came into it someplace. Her heart told her so.

And could she back out of this? Could she, even if she wanted to? Now it was Kelton, as well. Mr. Gaunt hadn't exactly told her that the news of what had happened to her son would end up all over town unless she did what he told her to do . . . but he had hinted as much. She couldn't bear for that to happen.

Is a woman not entitled to her pride? When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?

Yes. And yes. And yes.

Mr. Gaunt had told her she'd find the only tool she would need in the barn; now Polly began to walk slowly in that direction.

Go where ye list, but go there
alive,
Trisha,
Aunt Evvie had told her.
Don't be no ghost.

But now, stepping into the Camber barn through doors which hung gaping and frozen on their rusty tracks, she
felt
like a ghost. She had never felt more like a ghost in her life. The
azka
moved between her breasts . . . on its own now. Something inside. Something alive. She didn't like it, but she liked the idea of what would happen if that thing died even less.

She would do what Mr. Gaunt had told her to do, at least this once, cut all her ties with Alan Pangborn (it had been a mistake to ever begin with him, she saw that now, saw it clearly), and keep her past her own. Why not?

After all, it was such a little thing.

The shovel was exactly where he had told her it would be, leaning against one wall in a dusty shaft of sunlight. She took hold of its smooth, worn handle.

Suddenly she seemed to hear a low, purring growl from the deep shadows of the barn, as if the rabid Saint Bernard which had killed Big George Bannerman and caused the death of Tad Trenton were still here, back from the dead and meaner than ever. Gooseflesh danced up her arms and Polly left the barn in a hurry. The dooryard was not exactly cheery—not with that empty house glaring sullenly at her—but it was better than the barn.

What am I doing here?
her mind asked again, woefully, and it was Aunt Evvie's voice that came back:
Going ghost. That's what you're doing. You're going ghost.

Polly squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop it!” she whispered fiercely. “Just
stop it!”

That's right,
Leland Gaunt said.
Besides, what's the big deal? It's only a harmless little joke. And if something serious were to come of it—it won't, of course, but just supposing, for the sake of argument, that it did—whose fault would that be?

“Alan's,” she whispered. Her eyes rolled nervously in their sockets and her hands clenched and unclenched nervously between her breasts. “If he were here to talk to . . . if he hadn't cut himself off from me by snooping around in things that are none of his business . . .”

The little voice tried to speak up again, but Leland Gaunt cut it off before it could say a word.

Right again,
Gaunt said.
As to what you're doing here, Polly, the answer to that is simple enough: you're paying.
That'
s what you're doing, and that's
all
you're doing. Ghosts have nothing to do with it. And remember this, because it is the simplest, most wonderful aspect of commerce: once an item is paid for, it belongs to you. You didn't expect such a wonderful thing to come cheap, did you? But when you finish paying, it's yours. You have clear title to the thing you have paid for. Now will you stand here listening to those old frightened voices all day, or will you do what you came to do?

Polly opened her eyes again. The
azka
hung movelessly at the end of its chain. If it had moved—and she was no longer sure it had—it had stopped now. The house was just a house, empty too long and showing the inevitable signs of neglect. The windows were not eyes, but simply holes rendered glassless by adventuresome boys with rocks. If she had heard something in the barn—and she was no longer sure she had—it had only been the sound of a board expanding in the unseasonable October heat.

Her parents were dead. Her sweet little boy was dead. And the dog which had ruled this dooryard so terribly and completely for three summer days and nights eleven years ago was dead.

There were no ghosts.

“Not even me,” she said, and began to walk around the barn.

When you go around to the back of the barn,
Mr. Gaunt had said,
you'll see the remains of an old trailer.
She did; a silver-sided Air-Flow, almost obscured by goldenrod and high tangles of late sunflowers.

You'll see a large flat rock at the left end of the trailer.

She found it easily. It was as large as a garden paving stone.

Move the rock and dig. About two feet down you'll find a Crisco can.

She tossed the rock aside and dug. Less than five minutes after she started, the shovel's blade clunked on the can. She discarded the shovel and dug into the loose earth with her fingers, breaking the light webwork of roots with her fingers. A minute later she was holding the Crisco can. It was rusty but intact. The rotting label came loose and she saw a recipe for Pineapple Surprise Cake on the back (the list of ingredients was mostly obscured by a black blotch of mold), along with a Bisquick coupon that had expired in 1969. She got her fingers under the lid of the can and pried it loose. The whiff of air that escaped made her wince and draw her head back for a moment. That
voice tried one last time to ask what she was doing here, but Polly shut it out.

She looked into the can and saw what Mr. Gaunt had told her she would see: a bundle of Gold Bond trading stamps and several fading photographs of a woman having sexual intercourse with a collie dog.

She took these things out, stuffed them into her hip pocket, and then wiped her fingers briskly on the leg of her jeans. She would wash her hands as soon as she could, she promised herself. Touching these things which had lain so long under the earth made her feel unclean.

From her other pocket she took a sealed business envelope. Typed on the front in capital letters was this:

A MESSAGE FOR THE INTREPID TREASURE-HUNTER.

Polly put the envelope in the can, pressed the cover back down, and dropped it into the hole again. She used the shovel to fill in the hole, working quickly and carelessly. All she wanted right now was to get the hell out of here.

When she was done, she walked away fast. The shovel she slung into the high weeds. She had no intention of taking it back to the barn, no matter how mundane the explanation of the sound she had heard might be.

When she reached her car, she opened first the passenger door and then the glove compartment. She pawed through the litter of paper inside until she found an old book of matches. It took her four tries to produce one small flame. The pain had almost entirely left her hands, but they were shaking so badly that she struck the first three much too hard, bending the paper heads uselessly to the side.

When the fourth flared alight, she held it between two fingers of her right hand, the flame almost invisible in the hot afternoon sunlight, and took the matted pile of trading stamps and dirty pictures from her jeans pocket. She touched the flame to the bundle and held it there until she was sure it had caught. Then she cast the match aside and dipped the papers down to produce the maximum draft. The woman was malnourished and hollow-eyed. The dog looked mangy and just smart enough to be embarrassed.
It was a relief to watch the surface of the one photograph she could see bubble and turn brown. When the pictures began to curl up, she dropped the flaming bundle into the dirt where a woman had once beaten another dog, this one a Saint Bernard, to death with a baseball bat.