Needful Things (94 page)

How many others? How many?

He pulled up on the far side of the Tin Bridge just as
a bolt of lightning stroked down from the sky and severed one of the old elms on the other side of Castle Stream. There was a huge electrical crackle and a wild streak of brilliance. Alan threw an arm across his eyes, but an afterimage was still printed on them in stark blue as the radio uttered a loud blurt of static and the elm toppled with ponderous grandeur into the stream.

He dropped his arm, then yelled as thunder bellowed directly overhead, sounding loud enough to crack the world. For a moment his dazzled eyes could make out nothing and he was afraid the tree might have fallen on the bridge, blocking his way into town. Then he saw it lying just upstream of the rusty old structure, buried in a loom of rapids. Alan put the cruiser in gear and made the crossing. As he did, he could hear the wind, which was now blowing a gale, hooting in the struts and girders of the bridge. It was a creepy, lonely sound.

Rain pelted against the old station wagon's windshield, turning everything beyond it into a wavering hallucination. As Alan came off the bridge and onto Lower Main Street at its intersection with Watermill Lane, the rain began to come so hard that the wipers, even on fast speed, were entirely useless. He unrolled his window, stuck his head out, and drove that way. He was instantly soaked.

The area around the Municipal Building was loaded with police cars and newsvans, but it also had a weird, deserted look, as if the people who belonged to all these vehicles had suddenly been teleported to the planet Neptune by evil aliens. Alan saw a few newspeople peering out from the shelter of their vans, and one State cop ran down the alley which led to the Municipal Building's parking lot, rainwater spatting up from his shoes, but that was all.

Three blocks up, toward Castle Hill, an S.P. cruiser shot across Upper Main at high speed, heading west along Laurel Street. A moment later, another cruiser shot across Main. This one was on Birch Street and headed in the opposite direction from the first. It happened so fast—zip, zip—that it was like something you'd see in a comedy movie about bumbling police.
Smokey and the Bandit,
perhaps. Alan, however, saw nothing funny in it. It gave him a sense of action without purpose, a kind of panicky, helter-skelter movement. He was suddenly sure that Henry Payton had lost control of whatever was happening in Castle Rock tonight . . . if he'd ever had anything more than an illusion of control in the first place, that was.

He thought he could hear faint cries coming from the direction of Castle Hill. With the rain, thunder, and driving wind it was hard to tell for sure, but he did not think those cries were just imagination. As if to prove this, a State Police car roared out of the alley next to the Municipal Building, flashing headlights and whirling domelights illuminating silvery streaks of rain, and headed in that direction. It nearly sideswiped an oversized WMTW newswagon in the process.

Alan remembered feeling, earlier this week, that there was something badly out of joint in his little town—that things he could not see were going wrong and Castle Rock was trembling on the edge of some unthinkable disorder. And now the disorder had come, and it had all been planned by the man

(Brian said Mr. Gaunt wasn't really a man at all)

Alan had never quite managed to see.

A scream rose in the night, high and drilling. It was followed by the sound of shattering glass . . . and then, from somewhere else, a gunshot and a burst of cracked, idiot laughter. Thunder banged in the sky like a pile of dropped boards.

But I have time now, Alan thought. Yes. Plenty of time. Mr. Gaunt, I think we ought to say hello to each other, and I think it's high time you found out what happens to people who fuck with my town.

Ignoring the faint sounds of chaos and violence he heard through his open window, ignoring the Municipal Building where Henry Payton was presumably coordinating the forces of law and order—or trying to—Alan drove up Main Street toward Needful Things.

As he did, a violent white-purple bolt of lightning flared across the sky like an electric firetree, and while the accompanying cannonade of thunder was still roaring overhead, all the lights in Castle Rock went out.

Deputy Norris Ridgewick, clad in the uniform he kept for parades and other dress occasions, was in the shed attached to the little house he had shared with his mother until she died of a stroke in the fall of 1986, the house where he had lived alone since then. He was standing on a stool. A heavy length of noosed rope hung down from one of the overhead beams. Norris ran his head into this noose and was pulling it tight against his right ear when lightning flashed and the two electric bulbs which lit the shed winked out.

Still, he could see the Bazun fishing rod leaning against the wall by the door which led into the kitchen. He had wanted that fishing rod so badly and had believed he had gotten it so cheaply, but in the end the price had been high. Too high for Norris to pay.

His house was on the upper arm of Watermill Lane, where the Lane hooks back toward Castle Hill and the View. The wind was right, and he could hear the sounds of the brawl which was still going on there—the screams, the yells, the occasional gunshot.

I'm responsible for that, he thought. Not completely—hell, no—but I'm a part of it. I participated. I'm the reason Henry Beaufort is hurt or dying, maybe even dead over in Oxford. I'm the reason Hugh Priest is on a cooling-board. Me. The fellow who always wanted to be a policeman and help folks, the fellow who wanted that ever since he was a kid. Stupid, funny, clumsy old Norris Ridgewick, who thought he needed a Bazun fishing rod and could get one cheap.

“I'm sorry for what I did,” Norris said. “That doesn't fix it, but for whatever it's worth, I'm
real
sorry.”

He prepared to jump off the stool, and suddenly a new voice spoke up inside his head.
Then why don't you try to put it right, you chickenshit coward?

“I can't,” Norris said. Lightning blazed; his shadow jumped crazily on the shed wall, as if he were already doing the air-dance. “It's too late.”

Then at least take a look at what you did it
FOR,
the
angry voice insisted.
You can do that much, can't you? Take a look! Take a really
GOOD
look!

The lightning flashed again. Norris stared at the Bazun rod . . . and let out a scream of agony and disbelief. He jerked, almost tumbling off the stool and hanging himself by accident.

The sleek Bazun, so limber and strong, was no longer there. It had been replaced by a dirty, splintery bamboo pole, really no more than a stick with a kid's Zebco reel attached to it by one rusty screw.

“Someone stole it!” Norris cried. All of his bitter jealousy and paranoid covetousness returned in a flash, and he felt that he must rush out into the streets and find the thief. He must kill them all, everyone in town, if that was necessary, to get the evil man or woman responsible. “
SOMEONE STOLE MY BAZUN!”
he wailed again, swaying on the stool.

No,
the angry voice replied.
This is how it always was. All that's been stolen is your blinders—the ones you put on yourself, of your own free will.

“No!” Monstrous hands seemed to be clapped against the sides of Norris's head; now they began to squeeze. “No, no,
no!”

But the lightning flashed, again showing him the dirty bamboo rod where the Bazun had been only moments before. He had put it there so it would be the last thing he ever saw, when he stepped off the stool. No one had been in here; no one had moved it; consequently the voice had to be right.

This is how it always was,
the angry voice insisted.
The only question is this: are you going to do something about it, or are you going to run away into the darkness?

He began to grope for the noose, and at that moment he sensed he was not alone in the shed. In that moment he seemed to smell tobacco and coffee and some faint cologne—Southern Gentleman, perhaps—the smells of Mr. Gaunt.

Either he lost his balance or angry, invisible hands pushed him from the stool. One foot clipped it as he swayed outward and knocked it over.

Norris's shout was choked off as the slip-knot pulled tight. One flailing hand found the overhead beam and
caught it. He yanked himself partway up, providing himself with some slack. His other hand clawed at the noose. He could feel hemp pricking at his throat.

No is right!
he heard Mr. Gaunt cry out angrily.
No is exactly right, you damned welsher!

He wasn't here, not really; Norris knew he hadn't been pushed. Yet he felt a complete certainty that part of Mr. Gaunt
was
here just the same . . . and Mr. Gaunt was not pleased, because this was not the way it was supposed to go. The suckers were supposed to see
nothing.
Not, at least, until it was too late to matter.

He yanked and clawed at the noose, but it was as if the slip-knot had been dipped in concrete. The arm which was holding him up trembled wildly. His feet scissored back and forth three feet above the floor. He could not hold this half-chin-up much longer. It was amazing he had been able to keep any slack in the rope at all.

At last he managed to wiggle two of his fingers under the noose and pull it partway open. He shook his head out of it just as a horrible, numbing cramp struck the arm that was holding him up. He toppled to the floor in a sobbing heap, holding his cramped arm to his chest. Lightning flew and turned the spit on his bared teeth into tiny purple arcs of light. He grayed out then . . . for how long he didn't know, but the rain was still pelting and the lightning was still flashing when his mind swam back into itself.

He staggered to his feet and walked over to the fishing pole, still holding his arm. The cramp was beginning to loosen now, but Norris was still panting. He seized the pole and examined it closely and angrily.

Bamboo. Dirty, filthy bamboo. It wasn't worth everything; it was worth
nothing.

Norris's thin chest hitched in breath, and he uttered a scream of shame and rage. At the same moment he raised his knee and snapped the fishing rod over it. He doubled the pieces and snapped them again. They felt nasty—almost germy—in his hands. They felt
fraudulent.
He cast them aside and they rattled to a stop by the overturned stool like so many meaningless pick-up sticks.

“There!” he cried. “There!
There!
THERE!”

Norris's thoughts turned to Mr. Gaunt. Mr. Gaunt
with his silver hair and his tweed and his hungry, jostling smile.

“I'm going to get you,” Norris Ridgewick whispered. “I don't know what happens after that, but I am going to get you
so
good.”

He walked to the shed door, yanked it open, and stepped out into the pouring rain. Unit 2 was parked in the driveway. He bent his thin Barney Fife body into the wind and walked over to it.

“I dunno what you are,” Norris said, “but I'm coming for your lying, conning ass.”

He got into the cruiser and backed down the driveway. Humiliation, misery, and anger were equally at war on his face. At the foot of the driveway he turned left and began driving toward Needful Things as fast as he dared.

Polly Chalmers was dreaming.

In her dream she was walking into Needful Things, but the figure behind the counter was not Leland Gaunt; it was Aunt Evvie Chalmers. Aunt Evvie was wearing her best blue dress and her blue shawl, the one with the red edging. Gripped between her large and improbably even false teeth was a Herbert Tareyton.

Aunt Evvie!
Polly cried in her dream. A vast delight and an even vaster relief—that relief we only know in happy dreams, and in the moment of waking from horrid ones—filled her like light.
Aunt Evvie, you're alive!

But Aunt Evvie showed no sign of recognition.
Buy anything you want, Miss,
Aunt Evvie said.
By the way—was your name Polly or Patricia? I disremember, somehow.

Aunt Evvie, you know my name—I'm Trisha. I've always been Trisha to you.

Aunt Evvie took no notice.
Whatever your name is, we're having a special today. Everything must go.

Aunt Evvie, what are you doing here?

I
BELONG
here,
Aunt Evvie said.
Everyone in town belongs here, Miss Two-Names. In fact, everyone in the
WORLD
belongs here, because everyone loves a bargain.
Everyone loves something for nothing . . . even if it costs everything.

The good feeling was suddenly gone. Dread replaced it. Polly looked into the glass cases and saw bottles of dark fluid marked
DR. GAUNT'S ELECTRIC TONIC
. There were badly made wind-up toys that would cough up their cogs and spit out their springs the second time they were wound. There were crude sex-toys. There were small bottles of what looked like cocaine; these were labelled
DR. GAUNT'S KICKAPOO POTENCY POWDER
. Cheap novelties abounded: plastic dog-puke, itching powder, cigarette loads, joy buzzers. There was a pair of those X-ray glasses that were supposed to allow you to look through closed doors and ladies' dresses but actually did nothing except put raccoon rings around your eyes. There were plastic flowers and marked playing cards and bottles of cheap perfume labelled
DR. GAUNT'S LOVE POTION
#9,
TURNS LASSITUDE INTO LUST
. The cases were a catalogue of the timeless, the tasteless, and the useless.

Anything you want, Miss Two-Names,
Aunt Evvie said.

Why are you calling me that, Aunt Evvie? Please—don't you recognize me?