Needful Things

1

Danforth Keeton did not have a brain tumor, but he did have a terrible headache as he sat in his office early Saturday morning.

Spread out on his desk beside a stack of red-bound town tax ledgers for the years 1982 to 1989 was a sprawl of correspondence letters from the State of Maine Bureau of Taxation and Xeroxes of letters he had written in reply.

Everything was starting to come down around his ears. He knew it, but he was helpless to do anything about it.

Keeton had made a trip to Lewiston late yesterday, had returned to The Rock around twelve-thirty in the morning, and had spent the rest of the night pacing his study restlessly while his wife slept the sleep of tranquilizers upstairs. He had found his gaze turning more and more often to the small closet in the corner of his study.

There was a high shelf in the closet, stacked with sweaters. Most of the sweaters were old and motheaten. Under them was a carved wooden box his father had made long before the Alzheimer’s had stolen over him like a shadow, robbing him of all his considerable skills and memories.

There was a revolver in the box.

Keeton found himself thinking about the revolver more and more frequently. Not for himself, no; at least not at first. For Them.

The Persecutors.

At quarter to six he had left the house and had driven the dawnsilent streets between his house and the Municipal Building. Eddie Warburton, a broom in his hand and a Chesterfield in his mouth (the solid-gold Saint Christopher’s medal he had purchased at Needful Things the day before was safely hidden under his blue chambray shirt), had watched him trudge up the stairs to the second floor.

Not a word passed between the two men. Eddie had become used to Keeton’s appearances at odd hours over the last year or so, and Keeton had long ago ceased seeing Eddie at all.

Now Keeton swept the papers together, fought an impulse to simply rip them to shreds and fling the pieces everywhere, and began to sort through them. Bureau of Taxation correspondence in one pile, his own replies in another. He kept these letters in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet-a drawer to which only he had the key.

At the bottom of most of the letters was this notation: DK/sl.

DK was, of course, Danforth Keeton. sl was Shirley Laurence, his secretary, who took dictation and typed correspondence. Shirley had typed none of his responses to the Bureau’s letters, however, initials or no initials.

It was wiser to keep some things to yourself A phrase jumped out at him as he sorted: “… and we notice discrepancies in quarterly Town Tax Return I I for the tax-year 1989…”

He put it aside quickly.

Another: “… and in examining a sampling of Workmen’s Compensation forms during the last quarter of 1987, we have serious questions concerning.

Into the file.

Yet another: believe that your request for an examination deferral seems premature at this time…”

They blurred past him in a sickening swoop, making him feel as if he were on an out-of-control carnival ride.

“… questions about these tree-farm funds are… we find no record that the Town has filed…. dispersal of the State’s share of funding has not been adequately documented…”

… missing expense-account receipts m I must be… cash slips are not sufficient for…”

“… may request complete documentation of expenses.

And now this last, which had come yesterday. Which had in turn driven him to Lewiston, where he had vowed to never again go during harness-racing season, last night.

Keeton stared at it bleakly. His head pounded and throbbed; a large drop of sweat rolled slowly down the center of his back. There were dark, exhausted circles under his eyes. A cold sore clung to one corner of his mouth.

State House Augusta, Maine 04330 The letterhead, below the State Seal, screamed at him, and the salutation, which was cold and formal, threatened: To the Selectmen of Castle Rock.

Just that. No more “Dear Dan” or “Dear Mr. Keeton.” No more good wishes for his family at the closing. The letter was as cold and hateful as the stab of an icepick.

They wanted to audit the town books.

All the town books.

Town tax records, State and Federal revenue-sharing records, town expense records, road-maintenance records, municipal law enforcement budgets, Parks Department budgets, even financial records pertaining to the State-funded experimental tree farm.

They wanted to see everything, and They wanted to see it on the 17th of October. That was only five days from now.

They.

The letter was signed by the State Treasurer, the State Auditor, and, even more ominous, by the Attorney General-Maine’s top cop. And these were personal signatures, not reproductions.

“They,” Keeton whispered at the letter. He shook it in his fist and it rattled softly. He bared his teeth at it. “Theyyyyyyy!”

He slammed the letter down on top of the others. He closed the file. Typed neatly onthe tabwas CORRESPONDENCE, MAINE BUREAU OF TAXATION. Keeton stared at the closed file for a moment. Then he snatched a pen from its holder (the set had been agift from the Castle Countyjaycees) and slashed the words MAINE BUREAU OF KAKA! across the file in large, trembling letters. He stared at it a moment and then wrote MAINE BUREAU OF ASSHOLES! below it. He held the pen in his closed fist, wielding it like a knife. Then he threw it across the room. It landed in the corner with a small clatter.

Keeton closed the other file, the one which contained copies of letters he had written himself (and to which he always added his secretary’s lower-case initials), letters he had concocted on long, sleepless nights, letters which had ultimately proved fruitless. A vein pulsed steadily in the center of his forehead.

He got up, took the two files over to the cabinet, put them in the bottom drawer, slammed it shut, checked to make sure it was locked.

Then he went to the window and stood looking out over the sleeping town, taking deep breaths and trying to calm himself They had it in for him. The Persecutors. He found himself wondering for the thousandth time who had sicced Them on him in the first place. If he could find that person, that dirty Chief Persecutor, Keeton would take the gun from where it lay in its box under the motheaten sweaters and put an end to him. He would not do it quickly, however. Oh no. He would shoot off a piece at a time and make the dirty bastard sing the National Anthem while he did it.

His mind turned to the skinny deputy, Ridgewick. Could it have been him? He didn’t seem bright enough… but looks could be deceiving. Pangborn said Ridgewick had ticketed the Cadillac on his orders, but that didn’t make it true. And in the men’s room, when Ridgewick had called him Buster, there had been a look of knowing, jeering contempt in his eyes. Had Ridgewick been around when the first letters from the Bureau of Taxation began to come in? Keeton was quite sure he had been. Later today he would look up the man’s employment record, just to be sure.

What about Pangborn himself? He was certainly bright enough, he most certainly hated Danforth Keeton (didn’t They all? didn’t They all hate him?), and Pangborn knew lots of people in Augusta. He knew Them well. Hell, he was on the phone to Them every fucking day, it seemed. The phone bills, even with the WATS line, were horrible.

Could it be both of them? Pangborn and Ridgewick? In on it together?

“The Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion, Tonto,” Keeton said in a low voice, and smiled balefully. “If it was you, Pangborn, you’ll be sorry. And if it was both of you, you’ll both be sorry.” His hands slowly rolled themselves into fists. “I won’t stand this persecution forever, you know.”

His carefully manicured nails cut into the flesh of his palms. He did not notice the blood when it began to flow. Maybe Ridgewick.

Maybe Pangborn, maybe Melissa Clutterbuck, the frigid bitch who was the Town Treasurer, maybe Bill Fullerton, the Second Selectman (he knew for a fact that Fullerton wanted his job and wouldn’t rest until he had it)…

Maybe all of them.

All of them together.

Keeton let out his breath in a long, tortured sigh, making a fogflower on the wire-reinforced glass of his office window. The question was, what was he going to do about it? Between now and the 17th of the month, what was he going to do?

The answer was simple: he didn’t know.

2

Danforth Keeton’s life as a young man had been a thing of clear blacks and whites, and he had liked that just fine. He had gone to Castle Rock High School and began working part-time at the family car dealership when he was fourteen, washing the demonstrators and waxing the showroom models. Keeton Chevrolet was one of the oldest Chevrolet franchises in New England and keystone of the Keeton financial structure. That had been a solid structure indeed, at least until fairly recently.

During his four years at Castle Rock High, he had been Buster to just about everyone. He took the commercial courses, maintained a solid B average, ran the student council almost singlehanded, and went on to Traynor Business College in Boston. He made straight A’s at Traynor and graduated three semesters early.

When he came back to The Rock, he quickly made it clear that his Buster days were over.

It had been a fine life until the trip he and Steve Frazier had made to Lewiston nine or ten years ago. That was when the trouble had started; that was when his neat black-and-white life began to fill with deepening shades of gray. mbled-not as Buster at C.R.H.S not as Dan at Traynor Business, not as Mr. Keeton of Keeton Chevrolet and the Board of Selectmen. As far as Keeton knew, no one in his whole family had gambled; he could not remember even such innocent pastimes as nickel skat or pitching pennies. There was no taboo against these things, no thou shalt not, but no one did them. Keeton had not laid down a bet on anything until that first trip to Lewiston Raceway with Steve Frazier. He had never placed a bet anywhere else, nor did he need to. Lewiston Raceway was all the ruin Danforth Keeton ever needed.

He had been Third Selectman then. Steve Frazier, now at least five years in his grave, had been Castle Rock’s Head Selectman.

Keeton and Frazier had gone “up the city” (trips to Lewiston were always referred to in this way) along with Butch Nedeau, The Rock’s overseer of County Social Services, and Harry Samuels, who had been a Selectman for most of his adult life and would probably die as one. The occasion had been a statewide conference of county officials; the subject had been the new revenue-sharing laws… and it was revenue-sharing, of course, that had caused most of his trouble. Without it, Keeton would have been forced to dig his grave with a pick and shovel. With it, he had been able to use a financial bucket-loader.

It was a two-day conference. On the evening between, Steve had suggested they go out and have a little fun in the big city. Butch, and Harry had declined. Keeton had no interest in spending the evening with Steve Frazier, either-he was a fat old blowhard with lard for brains. He had gone, though. He supposed he would have gone if Steve had suggested they spend the evening touring the deepest shitpits of hell. Steve was, after all, the Head Selectman.

Harry Samuels would be content to drone along as Second, Third, or Fourth Selectman for the rest of his life, Butch Nedeau had already Indicated that he meant to step down after his current term… but Danforth Keeton had ambitions, and Frazier, fat old blowhard or not, was the key to them.

So they had gone out, stopping first at The Holly. BE JOLLY AT THE HOLLYI read the motto over the door, and Frazier had gotten very jolly indeed, drinking Scotch-and-waters as if the Scotch had been left out of them, and whistling at the strippers, who were mostly fat and mostly old and always slow. Keeton thought most of them looked stoned.

He remembered thinking it was going to be a long evening.

Then they had gone to the Lewiston Raceway and everything changed.

They got there in time for the fifth pace, and Frazier had hustled a protesting Keeton over to the betting windows like a sheepdog nipping a wayward lamb back to the herd.

“Steve, I don’t know anything about this-”

“That doesn’t matter,” Frazier replied happily, breathing Scotch fumes into Keeton’s face.

“We’re gonna be lucky tonight, Buster.

I can feel it.”

He hadn’t any idea of how to bet, and Frazier’s constant chatter made it hard to listen to what the other bettors in line were saying when they got to the two-dollar window.

When he got there, he pushed a five-dollar bill across to the teller and said, “Number four.”

“Win, place, or show?” the teller asked, but for a moment Keeton had not been able to reply. Behind the teller he saw an amazing thing.

Three clerks were counting and banding huge piles of currency, more cash than Keeton had ever seen in one place.

“Win, place, or show?” the teller repeated impatiently. “Hurry up, buddy. This is not the Public Library.”

“Win,” Keeton had said. He hadn’t the slightest idea what “place” and “show” meant, but “win” he understood very well.

The teller thrust him a ticket and three dollars’ change a one and a two. Keeton looked at the two with curious interest as Frazier placed his bet. He had known there were such things as two-dollar bills, of course, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen one before.

Thomas Jefferson was on it. Interesting. In fact, the whole thing was interesting-the smells of horses, popcorn, peanuts; the hurrying crowds; the atmosphere of urgency. The place was awake in a way he recognized and responded to at once. He had felt this sort of wakefulness in himself before, yes, many times, but it was the first time he had ever sensed it in the wider world. Danforth “Buster” Keeton, who rarely felt a part of anything, not really, felt he was a part of this. Very much a part.

“This beats hell out of The Holly,” he said as Frazier rejoined him.

“Yeah, harness racing’s okay,” Frazier said. “It won’t ever replace the World Series, but you know. Come on, let’s get over to the rail. Which horse did you bet on?”

Keeton didn’t remember. He’d had to check his ticket. “Number four,” he said.

“Place or show?”

“Uh… win.”

Frazier shook his head in good-natured contempt and clapped him on the shoulder. “Win’s a sucker bet, Buster. It’s a sucker bet even when the tote-board says it isn’t. But you’ll learn.”

And, of course, he had.

Somewhere a bell went off with a loud Brrrrr-rannggg! that made Keeton jump. A voice bellowed, “And theyyy’rrre OFF!” through the Raceway’s speakers. A thunderous roar went up from the crowd, and Keeton had felt a sudden spurt of electricity course through his body.

Hooves tattooed the dirt track. Frazier grabbed Keeton’s elbow with one hand and used the other to make a path through the crowd to the rail. They came out less than twenty yards from the finish line.

Now the announcer was calling the race. Number seven, My Lass, leading at the first turn, with number eight, Broken Field, second, and number one, How Do?, third. Number four was named Absolutely-the dumbest name for a horse Keeton had ever heard in his life-and it was running sixth. He hardly cared. He was transfixed by the pelting horses, their coats gleaming under the floodlights, by the blur of wheels as the sulkies swept around the turn, the bright colors of the silks worn by the drivers.

As the horses entered the backstretch, Broken Field began to press My Lass for the lead. My Lass broke stride and Broken Field flew by her. At the same time, Absolutely began to move up on the outside-Keeton saw it before the disembodied voice of the announcer sent the news blaring across the track, and he barely felt Frazier elbowing him, barely heard him screaming, “That’s your horse, Bustert That’s your horse and she’s got a chance!”

As the horses thundered down the final straightaway toward the place where Keeton and Frazier were standing, the entire crowd began to bellow. Keeton had felt the electricity whip through him again, not a spark this time but a storm. He began to bellow with them; the next day he would be so hoarse he could barely speak above a whisper.

“Absolutely!” he screamed. “Come on Absolutely, come on you bitch andr UN."’ “Trot,” Frazier said, laughing so hard tears ran down his cheeks.

“Come on you bitch and trot. That’s what you mean, Buster.”

Keeton paid no attention. He was in another world. He was sending brain-waves out to Absolutely, sending her telepathic strength through the air.

“Now it’s Broken Field and How Do?, How Do? and Broken Field", the godlike voice of the announcer chanted, “and Absolutely is gaining fast as they come to the last eighth of a mile@’ The horses approached, raising a cloud of dust. Absolutely trotted with her neck arched and her head thrust forward, legs rising and falling like pistons; she passed How Do? and Broken Field, who was flagging badly, right where Keeton and Frazier were standing. She was still widening her lead when she crossed the finish line.

When the numbers went up on the tote-board, Keeton had to ask Frazier what they meant. Frazier had looked at his ticket, then at the board. He whistled soundlessly.

“Did I make my money back?” Keeton asked anxiously.

“Buster, you did a little better than that. Absolutely was a thirtyto-one shot.”

Before he left the track that night, Keeton had made just over three hundred dollars. That was how his obsession was born.

3

He took his overcoat from the tree in the corner of his office, drew it on, started to leave, then stopped, holding the doorknob in his hand. He looked back across the room. There was a mirror on the wall opposite the window. Keeton looked at it for a long, speculative moment, then walked across to it. He had heard about how They used mirrors-he hadn’t been born yesterday.

He put his face against it, ignoring the reflection of his pallid skin and bloodshot eyes. He cupped a hand to either cheek, cutting off the glare, narrowing his eyes, looking for a camera on the other side.

Looking for Them.

He saw nothing.

After a long moment he stepped away, swabbed indifferently at the smeared glass with the sleeve of his overcoat, and left the office. Nothing yet, anyway. That didn’t mean They wouldn’t come in tonight, pull out his mirror, and replace it with one-way glass.

Spying was just another tool of the trade for the Persecutors. He would have to check the mirror every day now.

“But I can,” he said to the empty upstairs hallway. “I can do that. Believe me.”

Eddie Warburton was mopping the lobby floor and didn’t look up as Keeton stepped out onto the street.

His car was parked around back, but he didn’t feel like driving.

He felt too confused to drive; he would probably put the Caddy through someone’s store window if he tried. Nor was he aware, in I the depths of his confused mind, that he was walking away from his house rather than toward it. It was seven-fifteen on Saturday morning, and he was the only person out in Castle Rock’s small business district.

His mind went briefly back to that first night at Lewiston Raceway. He couldn’t do anything wrong, it seemed. Steve Frazier had lost thirty dollars and said he was leaving after the ninth race.

Keeton said he thought he would stay awhile longer. He barely looked at Frazier, and barely noticed when Frazier was gone. He did remember thinking it was nice not to have someone at his elbow saying Buster This and Buster That all the time. He hated the nickname, and of course Steve knew it-that was why he used it.

The next week he had come back again, alone this time, and had lost sixty dollars’ worth of previous winnings. He hardly cared.

Although he thought often of those huge stacks of banded currency, it wasn’t the money, not really; the money was just the symbol you took away with you, something that said you had been there, that you had been, however briefly, part of the big show. What he really cared about was the tremendous, walloping excitement that went through the crowd when the starter’s bell rang, the gates opened with their heavy, crunching thud, and the announcer yelled, “Theyyy’rrre OFF!” What he cared about was the roar of the crowd as the pack rounded the third turn and went hell-for-election down the backstretch, the hysterical camp-meeting exhortations from the stands as they rounded the fourth turn and poured on the coal down the homestretch. It was alive, oh, it was so alive. It was so alive that-that it was dangerous.

Keeton decided he’d better stay away. He had the course of his life neatly planned. He intended to become Castle Rock’s Head Selectman when Steve Frazier finally pulled the pin, and after six or seven years of that, he intended to stand for the State House of Representatives. After that, who knew? National office was not out of reach for a man who was ambitious, capable… and sane.

That was the real trouble with the track. He hadn’t recognized it at first, but he had recognized it soon enough. The track was a place where people paid their money, took a ticket… and gave up their sanity for a little while. Keeton had seen too much insanity in his own family to feel comfortable with the attraction Lewiston Raceway held for him. It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. When he went, he was unable to leave until the last race of the evening had been run. He knew. He had tried. Once he had made it almost all the way to the exit turnstiles before something in the back of his brain, something powerful, enigmatic, and reptilian, had arisen, taken control, and turned his feet around. Keeton was terrified of fully waking that reptile. Better to let it sleep.

For three years he had done just that. Then, in 1984, Steve Frazier had retired, and Keeton had been elected Head Selectman.

That was when his real troubles began.

He had gone to the track to celebrate his victory, and since he was celebrating, he decided to go whole hog. He bypassed the two- and five-dollar windows, and went straight to the ten-dollar window. He had lost a hundred and sixty dollars that night, more than he felt comfortable losing (he told his wife the next day that it had been forty), but not more than he could afford to lose. Absolutely not.

He returned a week later, meaning to win back what he had lost so he could quit evens. And he had almost made it. Almost-that was the key word. The way he had almost made it to the exit turnstiles. The week after, he had lost two hundred and ten dollars.

That left a hole in the checking account Myrtle would notice, and so he had borrowed a little bit from the town’s petty-cash fund to cover the worst of the shortfall. A hundred dollars. Peanuts, really.

Past that point, it all began to blur together. The pit had greased sides, all right, and once you started sliding you were doomed.

You could expend your energy clawing at the sides and succeed in slowing your fall… but that, of course, only drew out the agony.

If there had been a point of no return, it had been the summer of 1989. The pacers ran nightly during the summer, and Keeton was in attendance constantly through the second half of July and all of August. Myrtle had thought for awhile that he was using the racetrack as an excuse, that he was actually seeing another woman, and that was a laugh-it really was. Keeton couldn’t have got a hardon if Diana herself had driven down from the moon in her chariot with her toga open and a FUCK ME DANFORTH Sign hung around her neck. The thought of how deep he’d dipped into the town treasury had caused his poor dick to shrivel to the size of a pencil eraser.

When Myrtle finally became convinced of the truth, that it was only horse racing after all, she had been relieved. it kept him out of the house, where he tended to be something of a tyrant, and he couldn’t be losing too badly, she had reasoned, because the checkbook balance didn’t fluctuate that much. It was just that Danforth had found a hobby to keep him amused in his middle age.

Only horse racing after all, Keeton thought as he walked down Main Street with his hands plunged deep into his overcoat pockets.

He uttered a strange, wild laugh that would have turned heads if there had been anyone on the street. Myrtle kept her eye on the checking account. The thought that Danforth might have plundered the T-bills which were their life savings never occurred to her.

Likewise, the knowledge that Keeton Chevrolet was tottering on, the edge of extinction belonged to him alone.

She balanced the checkbook and the house accounts.

He was a CPA.

When it comes to embezzlement, a CPA can do a better job than most… but in the end the package always comes undone.

The string and tape and wrapping paper on Keeton’s package had begun to fall apart in the autumn of 1990. He had held things together as well as he could, hoping to recoup at the track. By then he had found a bookie, which enabled him to make bigger bets than the track would handle.

It hadn’t changed his luck, however.

And then, this summer, the persecution had begun in earnest.

Before, They had only been toying with him. Now They were moving in for the kill, and the Day of Armageddon was less than a week away.

I’ll get Them, Keeton thought. I’m not done yet. I’ve still got a trick or two up my sleeve.

He didn’t know what those tricks were@ though; that was the trouble.

Never mind, There’s a way. I know there’s a uHere his thoughts ceased. He was standing in front of the new store, Needful Things, and what he saw in the window drove everything else slap out of his mind for a moment or two.

It was a rectangular cardboard box, brightly colored, with a picture on the front. A board game, he supposed. But it was a board game about horse racing, and he could have sworn that the painting, which showed two pacers sweeping down on the finish line neckand-neck, was of the Lewiston Raceway. If that wasn’t the main grandstand in the background, he was a monkey.

The name of the game was WINNING TICKET.

Keeton stood looking at it for almost five minutes, as hypnotized as a kid looking at a display of electric trains. Then, slowly, he walked under the dark-green canopy to see if the place kept Saturday hours. There was a sign hanging inside the door, all right, but it bore only one word, and the word, naturally, was

Keeton looked at it for a moment, thinking-as Brian Rusk had before him-that it must have been left there by mistake. Main Street shops didn’t open at seven in Castle Rock, especially not on Saturday morning. All the same, he tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand.

As he opened the door, a small silver bell tinkled overhead.

4

“It’s not really a game,” Leland Gaunt was saying five minutes later, “you’re wrong about that.”

Keeton was seated in the plush high-backed chair where Nettle Cobb, Cyndi Rose Martin, Eddie Warburton, Everett Frankel, Myra Evans, and a good many other townsfolk had sat before him that week. He was drinking a cup of good Jamaican coffee. Gaunt, who seemed like one hell of a nice fellow for a flatlander, had insisted that he have one.

Now Gaunt was leaning into his show window and carefully removing the box. He was dressed in a wine-colored smoking jacket, just as natty as you please, and not a hair out of place. He had told Keeton that he often opened at odd hours, because he was afflicted with insomnia.

“Ever since I was a young man,” he had said with a rueful chuckle, “and that was many years ago.” He looked fresh as a daisy to Keeton, however, except for his eyes-they were so bloodshot they looked as if red were actually their natural color.

Now he brought the box over and set it on a small table next to Keeton.

“The box was what caught my eye,” Keeton said. “It looks quite a bit like the Lewiston Raceway. I go there once in awhile.”

“You like a flutter, do you?” Gaunt asked with a smile.

Keeton was about to say he never bet, and changed his mind.

The smile was not just friendly; it was a smile of commiseration, and he suddenly understood that he was in the presence of a fellow sufferer. Which just went to show how flaky he was getting around the edges, because when he had shaken Gaunt’s hand, he’d felt a wave of revulsion so sudden and deep it had been like a muscle spasm. For that one moment he had been convinced that he had found his Chief Persecutor. He would have to watch that sort of thing; there was no sense going overboard.

“I have been known to wager,” he said.

“Sadly, so have I,” Gaunt said. His reddish eyes fixed upon Keeton’s, and they shared a moment of perfect understanding… or so Keeton felt. “I’ve bet most of the tracks from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I’m quite sure the one on the box is Longacre Park, in San Diego. Gone, of course; there’s a housing development there now.”

“Oh,” Keeton said.

“But let me show you this. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

He took the cover off the box, and carefully lifted out a tin raceway on a platform about three feet long and a foot and a half wide.

It looked like toys Keeton had had as a child, the cheap ones made in japan after the war. The track was a replica of a two-mile course.

Eight narrow slots were set into it, and eight narrow tin horses stood behind the starting line. Each was mounted on a small tin post that poked out of its slot and was soldered to the horse’s belly.

“Wow,” Keeton said, and grinned. it was the first time he’d grinned in weeks, and the expression felt strange and out of place.

“You ain’t seen nuthin yet, as the man said,” Gaunt replied, grinning back. “This baby goes back to 1930 or ’35, Mr. Keeton-it’s a real antique. But it wasn’t just a toy to the racing touts of the day.”

“No?”

“No. Do you know what a Ouija board is?”

“Sure. You ask it questions and it’s supposed to spell out answers from the spirit world.”

“Exactly. Well, back in the Depression, there were a lot of racing touts who believed that Winning Ticket was the horse-player’s Ouija board.”

His eyes met Keeton’s again, friendly, smiling, and Keeton was as unable to draw his own eyes away as he had been to leave the track before the last race was run on the one occasion when he had tried.

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Keeton said. But it didn’t seem silly at all. It seemed perfectly… perfectly…

Perfectly reasonable.

Gaunt felt around in the box and brought out a little tin key.

“A different horse wins each time. There’s some sort of random mechanism inside, I suppose@rude but effective enough. Now watch.”

He inserted the key in a hole on the side of the tin platform on which the tin horses stood, and turned it. There were small clicks and clacks and ratchets-winding-up sounds. Gaunt removed the key when it wouldn’t turn anymore.

“What’s your pick?” he asked.

“The five,” Keeton said. He leaned forward, his heart picking up speed. It was foolish-and the ultimate proof of his compulsion, he supposed-but he could feel all the old excitement sweeping through him.

“Very well, I pick the six-horse. Shall we have a little wager, just to make it interesting?”

:’sure! How much?”

’Not money,” Gaunt said. “My days of betting for money ended long ago, Mr. Keeton. They are the least interesting wagers of all.

Let’s say this: if your horse wins, I’ll do you a little favor.

Your choice. If mine wins, you have to do me a favor.”

“And if another one wins, all bets are off?”

“Right. Are you ready?”

“Ayup,” Keeton said tightly, and leaned close to the tin racecourse. His hands were clamped together between his large thighs.

There was a small metal lever sticking out of a slot by the starting line. “And they’re off,” Gaunt said softly, and pushed it.

The cogs and gears below the race-course began to grind. The horses moved away from the starting line, sliding along their appointed courses. They went slowly at first, wavering back and forth in the slots and progressing in little jerks as some mainspring-or a whole series of them-expanded inside the board, but as they approached the first turn they began to pick up speed.

The two-horse took the lead, followed by the seven; the others were back in the pack.

“Come on, five!” Keeton cried softly. “Come on five, pull, you bitch!”

As if hearing him, the small tin steed began to draw away from the pack. At the half, it had caught up with the seven. The sixhorse Gaunt’s pick-had also begun to show some speed.

Winning Ticket rattled and vibrated on the small table. Keeton’s face hung over it like a large, flawed moon. A drop of sweat fell on the tiny tin jockey piloting the three-horse; if he had been a real man, both he and his mount would have been drenched.

At the third turn the seven-horse put on a burst of speed and caught the two, but Keeton’s five-horse was hanging on for dear life, and Gaunt’s six was at its heels. These four rounded the turn in a bunch well ahead of the others, vibrating wildly in their slots.

“Go You stupid bitch!” Keeton yelled. He had forgotten that they were merely pieces of tin fashioned into the crude likenesses of horses. He had forgotten he was in the shop of a man he had never met before. The old excitement had him. It shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat. “Go on and go for it! Pull, you bitch, PULL! Pour it ON!”

Now the five pulled even for the lead… and drew ahead.

Gaunt’s horse was moving up on its flank when Keeton’s horse crossed the finish line, a winner.

The mechanism was running down, but most of the horses made it back around to the starting line before the clockwork ceased entirely.

Gaunt used his finger to push the laggards up even with the others for another start.

“Whew!” Keeton said, and mopped his brow. He felt completely wrung out… but he also felt better than he had in a long, long time.

“That was pretty fine!”

“Fine as paint,” Gaunt agreed.

“They knew how to make things in the old days, didn’t they?”

“They did,” Gaunt agreed, smiling. “And it looks as though I owe you a favor, Mr. Keeton.”

“Aw, forget it-that was fun.”

“No, indeed. A gentleman always pays his bets. just let me know a day or two before you intend to call in your marker, as they say.”

Before you call in your marker.

That brought it all crashing back on him. Markers! They held his! They! On Thursday They would call those markers home… and what then? What then?

Visions of damning newspaper headlines danced in his head.

“Would you like to know how the serious bettors of the thirties used this toy?” Gaunt asked softly.

“Sure,” Keeton said, but he didn’t care, not really… not until he looked up. Then Gaunt’s eyes met his again, captured them again, and the idea of using a child’s game to pick winners seemed to make perfect sense again.

“Well,” Gaunt said, “they’d take that day’s newspaper or Racing Form and run the races, one by one. On this board, you know. They would give each horse in each race a name from the paper-they’d do it by touching one of the tin horses and saying the name at the same time-and then wind the thing up and let it go. They’d run the whole slate that way-eight, ten, a dozen races. Then they’d go to the track and bet on the horses that won at home.”

“Did it work?” Keeton asked. His voice seemed to be coming to him from some other place. A far place. He seemed to be floating in Leland Gaunt’s eyes. Floating on red foam. The sensation was queer but really quite pleasant.

“It seemed to,” Gaunt said. “Probably just silly superstition, but… would you like to buy this toy and try it for yourself.?”

“Yes,” Keeton said.

“You’re a man who needs a Winning Ticket quite badly, aren’t you, Danforth?”

“I need more than one. I need a whole slew of them. How much?”

Leland Gaunt laughed. “Oh no-you don’t get me that way!

Not when I am already in your debt! I’ll tell you what-open your wallet and give me the first bill you find in there. I’m sure it will be the right one.”

So Keeton opened his wallet and drew out a bill without looking away from Gaunt’s face, and of course it was the one with Thomas Jefferson’s face on it-the kind of bill which had gotten him into all this trouble in the first place.

5

Gaunt made it disappear as neatly as a magician doing a trick and said: “There is one more thing.”

“What?”

Gaunt leaned forward. He looked at Keeton earnestly, and touched him on the knee. “Mr. Keeton, do you know about…

Them?”

Keeton’s breath caught, the way the breath of a sleeper will sometimes catch when he finds himself in the throes of a bad dream.

“Yes,” he whispered. “God, yes"’ “This town is full of Them,” Gaunt went on in the same low, confidential tone. “Absolutely infested. I’ve been open less than a week, and I know it already. I think They may be after me. In fact, I’m quite sure of it. I may need your help.”

“Yes,” Keeton said. He spoke more strongly now. “By God, You’ll have all the help you need!”

“Now, You just met me and you don’t owe me a damned thing-” Keeton, who felt already that Gaunt was the closest friend he had made in the last ten years, opened his mouth to protest. Gaunt held up his hand, and the protests ceased at once.

“-and you don’t have the slightest idea if I’ve sold you something which will really work or just another bag of dreams… the kind that turn into nightmares when you give them a poke and a whistle. I’m sure you believe all this now; I have a great gift of I persuasion, if I do say so myself. But I believe In satisfied customers, Mr. Keeton, and only satisfied customers. I have been in business for many years, and I have built my reputation on satisfied customers. So take the toy.

If it works for you, fine. If it doesn’t, give ’

I it to the Salvation Army or throw it in the town dump. What are you out? Couple of bucks?”

“Couple of bucks,” Keeton agreed dreamily.

“But if it does work, and if you can clear your mind of these ephemeral financial worries, come back and see me. We’ll sit down and have coffee, just as we have this morning… and talk about Them.”

“It’s gone too far to just put the money back,” Keeton said in the clear but disconnected tones of one who talks in his sleep.

“There are more tracks than I can brush away in five days.”

“A lot can change in five days,” Mr. Gaunt said thoughtfully.

He rose to his feet, moving with sinuous grace. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you… and so do I.”

“But Them,” Keeton protested. “What about Them?”

Gaunt placed one of his long, chilly hands on Keeton’s arm, and even in his dazed state, Keeton felt his stomach curl up on itself at that touch. “We’ll deal with Them later,” he said. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

6

“John!” Alan called asjohn LaPointe slipped into the Sheriff’s Office by the alley door. “Good to see you!”

It was ten-thirty on Saturday morning and the Castle Rock Sheriff’s Office was as deserted as it ever got. Norris was out fishing somewhere, and Seaton Thomas was down in Sanford, visiting his two old-maid sisters. Sheila Brigham was at the Our Lady of Serene Waters rectory, helping her brother draft another letter to the paper explaining the essentially harmless nature of Casino Nite. Father Brigham also wanted the letter to express his belief that William Rose was as crazy as a cootiebug in a shitheap. One could not come right out and say such a thing, of course-not in a family newspaper-but Father John and Sister Sheila were doing the best they could to get the point across. Andy Clutterbuck was on duty somewhere, or so Alan assumed; he hadn’t called in since Alan arrived at the office an hour ago. Until John showed up, the only other person in the Municipal Building seemed to be Eddie Warburton, who was fussing with the water-cooler in the corner.

“What’s up, doc?” John asked, sitting on the corner of Alan’s desk.

“On Saturday morning? Not much. But watch this.” Alan unbuttoned the right cuff of his khaki shirt and pushed the sleeve up.

“Please notice that my hand never leaves my wrist.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. He Pulled a stick of juicy Fruit out of his pants pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and stuck it in his mouth.

Alan showed his open right palm, flipped his hand to display the back, then closed the hand into a fist. He reached into it with his left index finger and pulled out a tiny ear of silk. He waggled his eyebrows at John. “Not bad, huh?”

“If that’s Sheila’s scarf, she’s gonna be unhappy to find it all wrinkled up and smelling of your sweat,” John said. He seemed less than poleaxed with wonder.

“Not my fault she left it on her desk,” Alan replied. “Besides, magicians don’t sweat. Now say-hey and abracadabra!” He pulled Sheila’s scarf from his fist and puffed it dramatically into the air.

It billowed out, then settled onto Norris’s typewriter like a brightly colored butterfly. Alan looked at John, then sighed. “Not that great, huh?”

“It’s a neat trick,” John said, “but I’ve seen it a few times before.

Like maybe thirty or forty?”

“What do you think, Eddie?” Alan called. “Not bad for a backwoods Deputy Daws, huh?”

Eddie barely looked up from the cooler, which he was now filling from a supply of plastic jugs labelled SPRING WATER.

“Didn’t see, Shurf. Sorry.”

“Hopeless, both of you,” Alan said. “But I’m working on a variation, John. It’s going to wow you, I promise.”

“Uh-huh. Alan, do You still want me to check the bathrooms at that new restaurant out on the River Road?”

“I still do,” Alan said.

“Why do I always get the shit detail? Why can’t Norris-”.’ Norris checked the Happy Trails Campground johns in July and August,” Alan said. “In June I did it. Quit bitching, Johnny.

It’s just your turn. I want you to take water samples, too. Use a couple of the special pouches they sent from Augusta. There’s still a bunch in that cabinet in the hallway. I think I saw ’em behind Norris’s box of Hi-Ho crackers.”

“Okay,” John said, “you got it. But at the risk of sounding like I’m bitching again, checking the water for wigglebugs is supposed to be the restaurant-owner’s responsibility. I looked it up.”

“Of course it is,” Alan said, “but we’re talking Timmy Gagnon here, Johnny-what does that tell you?”

“It tells me I wouldn’t buy a hamburger at the new Riverside B-B-Q Delish if I was dying of starvation.”

“Correct!” Alan exclaimed. He rose to his feet and clapped John on the shoulder. “I’m hoping we can put the sloppy little son of a bitch out of business before the stray dog and cat population of Castle Rock starts to decline.”

“That’s pretty sick, Alan.”

“Nope-that’s Timmy Gagnon. Get the water samples this morning and I’ll ship them off to State Health in Augusta before I leave tonight.”

“What are you up to this morning?”

Alan rolled down his sleeve and buttoned the cuff. “Right now I’m going upstreet to Needful Things,” he said. “I want to meet Mr.

Leland Gaunt. He made quite an impression on Polly, and from what I hear around town, she’s not the only one who’s taken with him. Have you met him?”

“Not yet,” John said. They started toward the door. “Been by the place a couple of times, though. Interesting mix of stuff in the window.”

They walked past Eddie, who was now polishing the watercooler’s big glass bottle with a rag he had produced from his back pocket. He did not look at Alan and John as they went by; he seemed lost in his own private universe. But as soon as the rear door had clicked shut behind them, Eddie Warburton hurried into the dispatcher’s office and picked up the telephone.

7

“All right… yes… yes, I understand.”

Leland Gaunt stood beside his cash register, holding a Cobra cordless phone to his ear. A smile as thin as a new crescent moon curved his lips.

“Thank you, Eddie. Thank you very much.”

Gaunt strolled toward the curtain which closed off the shop from the area behind it. He poked his upper body through the curtain and bent over. When he pulled back through the curtain, he was holding a sign.

“YOu can go home now… yes… you may be sure I won’t forget.

I never forget a face or a service, Eddie, and that is one of the reasons why I strongly dislike being reminded of either.

Goodbye.”

He pushed the END button without waiting for a response, collapsed the antenna, and dropped the telephone into the pocket of his smoking jacket. The shade was drawn over his door again.

Mr. Gaunt reached between shade and glass to remove the sign which read

He replaced it with the one he had taken from behind the curtain, then went to the show window to watch Alan Pangborn approach.

Pangborn looked into the window Gaunt was looking out of for some time before approaching the door; he even cupped his hands and pressed his nose against the glass for a few seconds. Although Gaunt was standing right in front of him with his arms folded, the Sheriff did not see him.

Mr. Gaunt found himself disliking Pangborn’s face on sight.

Nor did this much surprise him. He was even better at reading faces than he was at remembering them, and the words on this one were large and somehow dangerous.

Pangborn’s face changed suddenly; the eyes widened a little, the good-humored mouth narrowed down to a tight slit. Gaunt felt a brief and totally uncharacteristic burst of fear. He sees me! he thought, although that, of course, was impossible. The Sheriff took half a step backward… and then laughed. Gaunt understood at once what had happened, but this did not moderate his instant deep dislike of Pangborn in the slightest.

“Get out of here, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Get out and leave me alone.”

8

Alan stood looking into the display window for a long time. He found himself wondering what, exactly, all the shouting was about.

He had spoken to Rosalie Drake before going over to Polly’s house yesterday evening, and Rosalie had made Needful Things sound like northern New England’s answer to Tiffany’s, but the set of china in the window didn’t look like anything to get up in the night and write home to mother about-it was rummage-sale quality at best. Several of the plates were chipped, and a hairline crack ran right through the center of one.

Oh well, Alan thought, different strokes for different folks.

That china’s probably a hundred years old, worth a fortune, and I’m just too dumb to know it.

He cupped his hands to the glass in order to see beyond the display, but there was nothing to look at-the lights were off and the place was deserted. Then he thought he caught sight of someone-a strange, transparent someone looking out at him with ghostly and malevolent interest. He took half a step backward before realizing it was the reflection of his own face he was seeing.

He laughed a little, embarrassed by his mistake.

He strolled to the door. The shade was drawn; a hand-lettered sign hung from a clear plastic suction cup.

GONE TO PORTLAND TO RECEIVE A CONSIGNMENT OF GOODS SORRY TO HAVE MISSED YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN Alan pulled his wallet from his back pocket, removed one of his business cards, and scribbled a brief message on the back.

Dear Mr. Gaunt, I dropped by Saturday morning to say hello and welcome you to town. Sorry to have missed you. Hope you’re enjoying Castle Rock! I’ll drop by again on Monday. Maybe we could have a cup of coffee. If there’s anything I can do for you, my numbers-home and office-are on the other side.

Alan Pangborn He stooped, slid the card under the door, and stood up again.

He looked into the display window a moment longer, wondering who would want that set of nondescript dishes. As he looked, a queerly pervasive feeling stole over him-a sense of being watched.

Alan turned around and saw no one but Lester Pratt. Lester was putting one of those damned posters up on a telephone pole and not looking in his direction at all. Alan shrugged and headed back down the street toward the Municipal Building. Monday would be time enough to meet Leland Gaunt; Monday would be just fine.

9

Mr. Gaunt watched him out of sight, then went to the door and picked up the card Alan had slid beneath. He read both sides carefully, and then began to smile. The Sheriff meant to drop by again on Monday, did he? Well, that was just fine, because Mr.

Gaunt had an idea that by the time Monday rolled around, Castle County’s Sheriff was going to have other fish to fry. A whole mess of other fish. And that was just as well, because he had met men like Pangborn before, and they were good men to steer clear of, at least while one was still building up one’s business and feeling out one’s clientele. Men like Pangborn saw too much.

“Something happened to you, Sheriff,” Gaunt said. “Something that’s made you even more dangerous than you should be. That’s on your face, too. What was it, I wonder? Was it something you did, something you saw, or both?”

He stood looking out onto the street, and his lips slowly pulled back from his large, uneven teeth. He spoke in the low, comfortable tones of one who has been his own best listener for a very long time.

“I’m given to understand you’re something of a parlor prestidigitator, my uniformed friend. You like tricks. I’m going to show you a few new ones before I leave town. I’m confident they will amaze you.”

He rolled his hand into a fist around Alan’s business card, first bending and then crumpling it. When it was completely hidden, a lick of blue fire squirted out from between his second and third fingers.

He opened his hand again, and although little tendrils of smoke drifted up from the palm, there was no sign of the cardnot even a smear of ash.

“Say-hey and abracadabra,” Gaunt said softly.

10

Myrtle Keeton went to the door of her husband’s study for the third time that day and listened. When she got out of bed around nine o’clock that morning, Danforth had already been in there with the door locked. Now, at one in the afternoon, he was still in there with the door locked. When she asked him if he wanted some lunch, he told her in a muffled voice to go away, he was busy.

She raised her hand to knock again… and paused. She cocked her head slightly. A noise was coming from beyond the door-a grinding, rattling sound. It reminded her of the sounds her mother’s cuckoo clock had made during the week before it broke down completely.

She knocked lightly. “Danforth?”

“Go away!” His voice was agitated, but she could not tell if the reason was excitement or fear.

“Danforth, are you all right?”

“Yes, dammit! Go away! I’ll be out soon!”

Rattle and grind. Grind and rattle. It sounded like dirt in a dough-mixer. It made her a little afraid. She hoped Danforth wasn’t having a nervous breakdown in there. He had been acting so strange lately.

“Danforth, would you like me to go down to the bakery and get some doughnuts?”

“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Yes! Doughnuts! Toilet paper! A nose job! Go anywhere! Get anything! just leave me alone!”

She stood a moment longer, troubled. She thought about knocking again and decided not to. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what Danforth was doing in his study. She was no longer sure she even wanted him to open the door.

She put on her shoes and her heavy fall coat-it was sunny but chilly-and went out to the car. She drove down to The Country Oven at the end of Main Street and got half a dozen doughnutshoney-glazed for her, chocolate coconut for Danforth. She hoped they would cheer him up-a little chocolate always cheered her up.

On her way back, she happened to glance in the show window of Needful Things. What she saw caused her to jam both feet down on the brake-pedal, hard. If anyone had been following her, she would have been rammed for sure.

There was the most gorgeous doll in the window.

The shade was up again, of course. And the sign hanging from the clear plastic suction cup again read

Of course.

Polly Chalmers spent that Saturday afternoon in what was, for her, a most unusual fashion: by doing nothing at all. She sat by the window in her bentwood Boston rocker with her hands folded neatly in her lap, watching the occasional traffic on the street outside. Alan had called her before going out on patrol, had told her of having missed Leland Gaunt, had asked her if she was all right and if there was anything she needed. She had told him that she was fine and that she didn’t need a single thing, thanks. Both of these statements were lies; she was not fine at all and there were several things she needed. A cure for arthritis headed the list.

No, Polly what you really need is some courage. just enough to walk UP to the man you love and say, “Alan, I bent the truth in places about the years when I was away from Castle Rock, and I outright lied to you about what happened to my son. Now I’d like to ask your forgiveness and tell you the truth.”

It sounded easy when you stated it baldly like that. It only got hard when you looked the man you loved in the eyes, or when you tried to find the key that would unlock your heart without tearing it into bleeding, painful pieces.

Pain and lies; lies and pain. The two subjects her life seemed to revolve around just lately.

How are you today, Polly?

Fine, Alan. I’m fine.

In fact, she was terrified. it wasn’t that her hands were so awfully painful at this very second; she almost wished they did hurt, because the pain, bad as it was when it finally came, was still better than the waiting.

11

Shortly after noon today, she had become aware of a warm tingling-almost a vibration-in her hands. It formed rings of heat around her knuckles and at the base of her thumb; she could feel it lurking at the bottom of each fingernail in small, steely arcs like humorless smiles. She had felt this twice before, and knew what it meant. She was going to have what her Aunt Betty, who’d been afflicted with the same sort of arthritis, called a real bad spell. “When my hands start to tingle like electric shocks, I always know it’s time to batten down the hatches,” Betty had said, and now Polly was trying to batten down her own hatches, with a notable lack of success.

Outside, two boys walked down the middle of the street, tossing a football back and forth between them. The one on the rightthe youngest of the Lawes boys-went up for a high pass. The ball ticked off his fingers and bounced onto Polly’s lawn. He saw her looking out the window as he went after it and waved to her. Polly raised her own hand in return… and felt the pain flare sullenly, like a thick bed of coals in an errant gust of wind. Then it was gone again and there was only that eerie tingling. It felt to her the way the air sometimes felt before a violent electrical storm.

The pain would come in its own time; she could do nothing about it. The lies she had told Alan about Kelton, though… that was quite another thing. And, she thought, it’s not as though the truth is so awful, so glaring, so shocking… and it’s not as though he doesn’t already suspect or even know that you’ve lied. He does.

I’ve seen it in his face. So why is this so hard, Polly? Why?

Partially because of the arthritis, she supposed, and partially because of the pain medication she had come to rely on more and more heavily-the two things together had away of blurring rational thought, of making the clearest and cleanest of right angles look queerly skewed. Then there was the fact of Alan’s own pain… and the honesty with which he had disclosed it. He had laid it out for her inspection without a single hesitation.

His feelings in the wake of the peculiar accident which had taken

Annie’s and Todd’s lives were confused and ugly, surrounded by an unpleasant (and frightening) swirl of negative emotions, but he had laid them out for her just the same. He had done it because he wanted to find out if she knew things about Annie’s state of mind that he did not… but he had also done it because playing fair and keeping such things in the open were just part of his nature.

She was afraid of what he might think when he found out that playing fair wasn’t always a part of hers; that her heart as well as her hands had been touched with early frost.

She stirred uneasily in the chair.

I have to tell him-sooner or later I have to. And none of that explains why it’s so hard; none of that even explains why I told him the lies in the first place. I mean, it isn’t as if I killed my son…

She sighed-a sound that was almost a sob-and shifted in her chair.

She looked for the boys with the football, but they were gone. Polly settled back in her chair and closed her eyes.

12

She wasn’t the first girl to ever turn up pregnant as the result of a date-night wrestling match, or the first to ever argue bitterly with her parents and other relations as a result. They had wanted her to marry Paul “Duke” Sheehan, the boy who had gotten her pregnant.

She had replied that she wouldn’t marry Duke if he was the last boy on earth. This was true, but what her pride would not let her tell them was that Duke didn’t want to marry her-his closest friend had told her he was already making panicky preparations to join the Navy when he turned eighteen… which he would do in less than six weeks.

“Let me get this straight,” Newton Chalmers said, and had then torn away the last tenuous bridge between his daughter and himself.

“He was good enough to screw, but he’s not good enough to marry-is that about right?”

She had tried to run out of the house then, but her mother had caught her. If she wouldn’t marry the boy, Lorraine Chalmers said, speaking in the calm and sweetly reasonable voice that had driven Polly almost to madness as a teenager, then they would have to send her away to Aunt Sarah in Minnesota. She could stay in Saint Cloud until the baby came, then put it up for adoption.

“I know why you want me to leave,” Polly said. “It’s Great-aunt Evelyn, isn’t it? You’re afraid if she finds out I’ve got a bun in my oven, she’ll cut you out of her will. It’s all about money, isn’t it?

You don’t care about me at all. You don’t give a shit about m@’ Lorraine Chalmers’s sweetly reasonable voice had always masked a jackrabbit temper. She had torn away the last tenuous bridge between her daughter and herself by slapping Polly hard across the face.

So Polly had run away. That had been a long, long time ago-in July of 1970.

She stopped running for awhile when she got to Denver, and worked there until the baby was born in a charity ward which the patients called Needle Park. She had fully intended to put the child up for adoption, but something-maybe just the feel of him when the maternity nurse had put him in her arms after the delivery had changed her mind.

She named the boy Kelton, after her paternal grand father. The decision to keep the baby had frightened her a little, because she liked to see herself as a practical, sensible girl, and nothing which had happened to her over the last year or so fit that image. First the practical, sensible girl had gotten pregnant out of wedlock in a time when practical, sensible girls simply did not do such things.

Then the practical, sensible girl had run away from home and delivered her child in a city where she had never been before and knew nothing about. And to top it all off, the practical, sensible girl had decided to keep the baby and take it with her into a future she could not see, could not even sense.

At least she had not kept the baby out of spite or defiance; no one could hang that on her. She found herself surprised by love, that simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

She had moved on. No they had moved on. She had worked a number of menial jobs, and they had ended up in San Francisco, where she had probably intended to go all along. In that early summer of 1971 it had been a kind of hippie Xanadu, a hilly head shop full of freaks and folkies and yippies and bands with names like Moby Grape and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.

According to the Scott McKenzie song about San Francisco which had been popular during one of those years, summertime was supposed to be a love-in there. Polly Chalmers, who had been no one’s idea of a hippie even back then, had somehow missed the love-in. The building where she and Kelton lived was full of jimmied mailboxes and junkies who wore the peace-sign around their necks and, more often than not, kept switchblades in their scuffed and dirty motorcycle boots. The most common visitors in this neighborhood were process servers, repo men, and cops. A lot of cops, and you didn’t call them pigs to their faces; the cops had also missed the love-in, and were pissed about it.

Polly applied for welfare and found she had not lived in California long enough to qualify-she supposed things might be different now, but in 1971, it had been as hard for a young unwed mother to get along in San Francisco as it was anywhere else. She applied for Aid to Dependent Children, and waited-hoped-for something to come of it. Kelton never missed a meal, but she herself lived hand to mouth, a scrawny Young woman who was often hungry and always afraid, a young woman very few of the people who knew her now would have recognized. Her memories of those first three years on the West Coast, memories stored at the back of her mind like old clothes in an attic, were skewed and grotesque, images from a nightmare.

And wasn’t that a large part of her reluctance to tell Alan about those years? Didn’t she simply want to keep them dark? She hadn’t been the only one who had suffered the nightmare consequences of her pride, her stubborn refusal to ask for help, and the vicious hypocrisy of the times, which proclaimed the triumph of free love while simultaneously branding unmarried women with babies as creatures beyond the pale of normal society; Kelton had been there as well. Kelton had been her hostage to fortune as she slogged angrily along the track of her sordid fool’s crusade.

The horrible thing was that her situation had been slowly improving. In the spring of 1972 she had finally qualified for state help, her first A.D.C check had been promised for the following month, and she had been making plans to move into a slightly better place when the fire happened.

The call had come to her at the diner where she worked, and in her dreams, Norville, the short-order cook who had always been trying to get into her pants in those days, turned to her again and again, holding out the telephone. He said the same thing over and over:

Polly, it’s the police. They want to talk to you. Polly, it’s the police.

They want to talk to you.

They had indeed wanted to talk to her, because they had hauled the bodies of a young woman and a small child from the smoky third floor of the apartment building. They had both been burned beyond recognition.

They knew who the child was; if Polly wasn’t at work, they would know who the woman was, too.

For three months after Kelton’s death she had gone on working.

Her loneliness had been so intense that she was half-mad with it, so deep and complete that she hadn’t even been aware of how badly she was suffering. At last she had written home, telling her mother and father only that she was in San Francisco, that she had given birth to a boy, and that the boy was no longer with her. She would not have given further details if she had been threatened with redhot pokers.

Going home had not been a part of her plans thennot her conscious plans, at least-but it began to seem to her that if she did not re-establish some of her old ties, a valuable inside part of her would begin dying by inches, the way a vigorous tree dies from the branches inward when it is deprived of water too long.

Her mother had replied at once to the box number Polly gave as a return address, pleading with her to come back to Castle Rock… to come home. She enclosed a money order for seven hundred dollars. It was very warm in the tenement flat where Polly had been living since Kelton’s death, and she stopped halfway through the task of packing her bags for a cold glass of water. While she was drinking it, Polly realized that she was making ready to go home simply because her mother had asked-almost begged-her to do so. She hadn’t really thought about it at all, which was almost certainly a mistake. It was that sort of look-before-you-leap behavior, not Duke Sheehan’s puny little dingus, which had gotten her in trouble to begin with.

So she sat down on her narrow single-woman’s bed and thought about it. She thought long and hard. At last she voided the money order and wrote a letter to her mother. It was less than a page long, but it had taken her nearly four hours to get it right.

I want to come back, or at least try it on for size, but I don’t want us to drag out all the old bones and start chewing on them again if I do, she had written. I don’t know if what I really want-to start a new life in an old place-is possible for anyone, but I want to try.

So I have an idea: let’s be pen-pals for awhile. You and me, and me and Dad.

I have noticed that it’s harder to be angry and resentful on paper, so let’s talk that way for awhile before we talk in person.

They had talked that way for almost six months, and then one day in January of 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers had shown up at her door, bags in hand. They were registered at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, they said, and they were not going back to Castle Rock without her.

Polly had thought this over, feeling a whole geography of emotions: anger that they could be so high-handed, rueful amusement at the sweet and rather naive quality of that high-handedness, panic that the questions she had so neatly avoided answering in her letters would now be pressed home.

She had promised to go to dinner with them, no more than that-other decisions would have to wait. Her father told her he had only booked the room at the Mark Hopkins for a single night.

You had better extend the reservation, then, Polly said.

She had wanted to talk with them as much as she could before coming to any final decision-a more intimate form of the testing which had gone on in their letters. But that first night had been the only night they had had. It was the last night she had ever seen her father well and strong, and she had spent most of it in a red rage at him.

The old arguments, so easy to avoid in correspondence, had begun again even before pre-dinner glasses of wine were drunk.

They were brush-fires at first, but as her father continued to drink, they developed into an uncontrollable wall of fire. He had struck the spark, saying they both felt Polly had learned her lesson and it was time to bury the hatchet. Mrs. Chalmers had fanned the flames, dropping into her old cool, sweetly reasonable voice. Where is the baby, dear? You might at least tell us that much. You turned him over to the Sisters, I suppose.

Polly knew these voices, and what they meant, from times long past. Her father’s indicated his need to re-establish control; at all costs there must be control. Her mother’s indicated that she was showing love and concern In the only way she knew, by demanding information. Both voices, so familiar, so loved and despised, had ignited the old, wild anger in her.

They left the restaurant halfway through the main course, and the next day Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers had flown back to Maine alone.

After a three-month hiatus, the correspondence had begun again, hesitantly. Polly’s mother wrote first, apologizing for the disastrous evening. The pleas to come home had been dropped.

This surprised Polly… and filled some deep and barely acknowledged part of her with anxiety. She felt that her mother was finally denying her. This was, under the circumstances, both foolish and self-indulgent, but that did not change those elemental feelings in the slightest.

I suppose you know your own mind best, she wrote to Polly. That’s hard for your father and me to accept, because we still see you as our little girl. I think it frightened him to see you looking so beautiful and so much older. And you mustn’t blame him too much for the way he acted.

He hasn’t been feeling well; his stomach has been kicking up on him again. The doctor says it’s only his gall bladder, and once he agrees to have it taken out all will be well, but I worry about him.

Polly had replied in the same conciliatory tone. She found it easier to do so now that she had started taking business-school classes and shelved her plans to return to Maine indefinitely. And then, near the end of 1975, the telegram had come. It was short and brutal: YOUR DAD HAS CANCER. HE IS DYING. PLEASE COME HOME. LOVE, MOM.

He was still alive when Polly got to the hospital in Bridgton, her head spinning with let-lag and the old memories seeing all the old places had prodded forth. The same wondering thought arose in her mind at each new turn of the road which led from the Portland jetport into the high hills and low mountains of western Maine.

The last time I saw that, I was a child!

Newton Chalmers lay in a private room, dozing in and out of consciousness, with tubes in his nose and machines gathered around him in a hungry semicircle. He died three days later. She had intended to go back to California right away-she almost thought of it as her home now-but four days after her father was buried, her mother suffered a crippling heart attack.

Polly had moved into the house. She nursed her mother for the next three and a half months, and at some point every night she would dream of Norville, the short-order cook at Yor Best Diner.

Norville turned to her again and again in these dreams, holding the telephone out in his right hand, the one with the eagle and the words DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on the back. Polly, it’s the police, Norville said. They want to talk to you.

Her mother was out of bed, on her feet again and talking about selling the house and moving to California with Polly (something she would never do, but Polly did not disabuse her of her dream-she was older by then, and a little kinder) when the second heart attack struck. So it was that on a raw afternoon in March of 1976, Polly had found herself in Homeland Cemetery, standing next to her Great-aunt Evelyn, and looking at a coffin which stood on bands next to her father’s fresh grave.

His body had lain in the Homeland crypt all winter, waiting for the earth to unlimber enough so it could be interred. In one of those grotesque coincidences which no decent novelist would dare invent, the interral of the husband had taken place just one day before the wife died. The sods on top of Newton Chalmers’s final apartment had not yet been replaced; the earth was still raw and the grave looked obscenely naked. Polly’s eyes kept straying from the coffin of her mother to the grave of her father. It was as if she was just waiting for him to be decently buried, she thought.

When the short service was over, Aunt Evvie had called her aside.

Polly’s last surviving relative stood by the Hay amp; Peabody funeral hack, a thin stick of a woman dressed in a man’s black overcoat and strangely jolly red galoshes, a Herbert Tareyton tucked into the corner of her mouth. She flicked a wooden match alight with one thumbnail as Polly approached, and set fire to the tip of her cigarette. She inhaled deeply and then hacked the smoke back out into the cold spring air. Her cane (a simple ash stick; it would be three years yet before she would be awarded the Boston Post Cane as the town’s oldest citizen) was planted between her feet.

Now, sitting in a Boston rocker that the old lady undoubtedly would have approved of, Polly calculated that Aunt Evvie must have been eighty-eight that spring-eighty-eight years old and still smoking like a chimney-although she had not looked much different to Polly than she had when Polly was a little girl, hoping for a penny sweet from the apparently endless supply Aunt Evvie kept in the pocket of her apron.

Many things in Castle Rock had changed in the years she had been gone, but Aunt Evvie was not one of them.

“Well, that’s over,” Aunt Evvie had said in her cigarette-raspy voice. “They’re in the ground, Polly. Mother and father both.”

Polly had burst into tears then, a miserable flood of them. She thought at first that Aunt Evvie would try to comfort her, and her flesh was already shrinking from the old woman’s touch-she didn’t want to be comforted.

And need not have worried. Evelyn Chalmers had never been a woman who believed in comforting the grief-stricken; might in fact have believed, Polly sometimes thought later, that the very idea of comfort was an illusion. In any case, she only stood there with her cane planted between her red galoshes, smoking and waiting for Polly’s tears to give way to sniffles as she brought herself under control.

When this had been accomplished, Aunt Evvie asked: “Your chap-the one they spent so much time fussing over-is dead, isn’t he?”

Though she had guarded this secret jealously from everyone, Polly found herself nodding. “His name was Kelton.”

“A goodish name,” Aunt Evvie said. She drew on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly from her mouth so she could draw the smoke back up her nose-what Lorraine Chalmers had called a “double-pump,” wrinkling her nose in distaste as she said it. “I knew it the first time you come over to see me after you got home.

Saw it in your eyes.”

“There was a fire,” Polly said, looking up at her. She had a tissue but it was too soggy to do any more business; she put it in her coat pocket and used her fists instead, screwing them into her eyes like a little girl who has fallen off her scooter and banged her knee.

“The young woman I hired to babysit him probably started it.”

“Ayuh,” Aunt Evvie said. “But do you want to know a secret, Trisha?”

Polly nodded her head, smiling a little. Her real name was Patricia, but she had been Polly to everyone since her babyhood.

Everyone except Aunt Evvie.

“Baby Kelton’s dead… but you’re not.” Aunt Evvie tossed her cigarette away and used one bony forefinger to tap against Polly’s chest for emphasis. “You’re not. So what are you going to do about it?”

Polly thought it over. “I’m going back to California,” she said finally. “That’s all I know.”

“Yes, and that’s all right for a start. But it’s not enough.”

And then Aunt Evvie said something very close to what Polly herself would say, some years later, when she went to dinner at The Birches with Alan Pangborn: “You’re not the culprit here, Trisha. Have you got that sorted out?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Then you don’t. Until you realize that, it won’t matter where you go, or what you do. There won’t be any chance.”

“What chance?” she had asked, bewildered.

“Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?”

She had shaken her head slowly.

“Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evvie said.

“That’s what ghosts are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.”

“I feel…”

“Yes,” Aunt Evvie said. “I know you do. But they don’t. Your mother and my nephew don’t. Your chap, the one who died while you been Away, he don’t. Do you understand me?”

She had. A little, anyway.

“You’re right not to want to stay here, Polly-at least, you’re right for now. Go back where you were. Or go someplace newSalt Lake, Honolulu, Baghdad, wherever you want. It don’t matter, because sooner or later you will come back here. I know that; this place belongs to you and you belong to it. That’s written in every line of your face, in the way you walk, the way you talk, even the way you have of narrowin your eyes when you look at someone you ain’t met before.

Castle Rock was made for you and you for it. So there is no hurry.

’Go where ye list,’ as the Good Book says.

But go there alive, Trisha. Don’t be no ghost. If you turn into one of those, it might be better if you stayed away.”

The old woman looked around broodingly, her head rotating above her cane.

“Goddam town’s got enough ghosts already,” she said.

“I’ll try, Aunt Evvie.”

“Yes-I know you will. Trying-that’s built into you, too.” Aunt Evvie looked her over closely. “You were a fair child, and a likely child, although you weren’t ever a lucky child. Well, luck is for fools. It’s all they have to hope for, poor devils. It strikes me that you are still likely and fair, and that’s the important thing. I think you’ll make out.” Then, briskly, almost arrogantly: “I love you, Trisha Chalmers. I always have.”

“I love you, too, Aunt Evvie.”

Then, in that careful way which the old and young have of showing affection, they embraced. Polly had smelled the old aroma of Aunt Evvie’s sachet-a tremor of violets-and that made her weep again.

When she stood back, Aunt Evvie was reaching into her coat pocket.

Polly watched for her to bring out a tissue, thinking in an amazed way that at last, after all the long years, she would see the old woman cry. But she hadn’t. Instead of a tissue, Aunt Evvie brought out a single wrapped hard candy, just as she had in those days when Polly Chalmers had been a little girl with braids hanging over the front of her middy blouse.

“Would you like a sweet, honey?” she had asked cheerfully.

13

Twilight had begun to steal across the day.

Polly straightened up in the rocker, aware that she had almost fallen asleep. She bumped one of her hands, and a hard bolt of pain raced up her arm before being replaced once more by that hot anticipatory tingle. It was going to be bad, all right. Later tonight or tomorrow, it was going to be very bad indeed.

Never mind what you can’t change, Polly-there’s at least one thing you can change, must change. You have to tell Alan the truth about Kelton. You have to stop harboring that ghost in your heart.

But another voice rose up in response an angry, frightened, clamorous voice. The voice of pride, she supposed, just that, but she was shocked by its strength and ardor as it demanded that those old days, that old life, not be exhumed… not for Alan, not for anybody. That, above all, her baby’s short life and miserable death should not be given over to the sharp, wagging tongues of the town gossips.

Whatfoolishness is that, Trisha? Aunt Evvie asked in her mindAunt Evvie, who had died so full of years, double-pumping her beloved Herbert Tareytons to the last. What does it matter if Alan finds out how Kelton really died? What does it matter if every old gossip in town, from Lenny Partridge to Myrtle Keeton, knows? Do you think anyone cares a fig about your bun anymore, you silly goose? Don’t flatter yourself-it’s old news. Hardly worth a second cup of coffee in Nan’s.

Maybe so… but he had been hers, God damn it, hers. In his life and in his death, he had been hers. And she had been hers, too-not her mother’s, her father’s, Duke Sheehan’s. She had belonged to herself.

That frightened, lonely girl who had washed her panties out every night in the rusty kitchen sink because she had only three pairs, that frightened girl who always had a cold-sore waiting to happen at the corner of her lip or on the rim of one nostril, that girl who sometimes sat at the window overlooking the airshaft and laid her hot forehead on her arms and cried-that girl was hers. Her memories of herself and her son together in the dark of night, Kelton feeding at one small breast while she read a John D. MacDonald paperback and the disconnected sirens rose and raved through the cramped, hilly streets of the city, those memories were hers. The tears she had cried, the silences she had endured, the long, foggy afternoons in the diner trying to avoid Norville Bates’s Roman hands and Russian fingers, the shame with which she had finally made an uneasy peace, the independence and the dignity she had fought so hard and so inconclusively to keep… those things were hers, and must not belong to the town.

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 selfindulgent 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.”

14

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 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.

1st Race: BAZOOKAJOAN

2nd Race: FILLY DELFIA

3rd Race: TAMMY’s WONDER

4th Race: I’M AMAZED

5th Race: BY GEORGE

6th Race: PUCKY BOY

7th Race: CASCO THUNDER

8th Race: DELIGHTFUL SON

9th Race: TIKO-TIKO

five in the afternoon, but Danforth Keeton was