Needful Things

1

South Paris is a small and squalid milltown eighteen miles northeast of Castle Rock. It is not the only jerkwater Maine town named after a European city or country; there is a Madrid (the natives pronounce it Mad-drid), a Sweden, an Etna, a Calais (pronounced so it rhymes with Dallas), a Cambridge, and a Frankfort. Someone may know how or why so many wide places in the road ended up with such an exotic variety of names, but I do not.

What I do know is that about twenty years ago a very good French chef decided to move out of New York and open his own restaurant in Maine’s Lakes Region, and that he further decided there could be no better place for such a venture than a town named South Paris. Not even the stench of the tanning mills could dissuade him. The result was an eating establishment called Maurice.

It is still there to this day, on Route 117 by the railroad tracks and just across the road from McDonald’s. And it was to Maurice that Danforth “Buster” Keeton took his wife for lunch on Sunday, October 13th.

Myrtle spent a good deal of that Sunday in an ecstatic daze, and the fine food at Maurice was not the reason. For the last few months-almost a year, really-life with Danforth had been extremely unpleasant. He ignored her almost completely… except when he yelled at her. Her self-esteem, which had never been very high, plummeted to new depths. She knew as well as any woman ever has that abuse does not have to be administered with the fists to be effective. Men as well as women can wound with their tongues, and Danforth Keeton knew how to use his very well; he had inflicted a thousand invisible cuts on her with its sharp sides over the last year.

She did not know about the gambling-she really believed he went to the track mostly to watch. She didn’t know about the embezzlement, either. She did know that several members of Danforth’s family had been unstable, but she did not connect this behavior with Danforth himself. He didn’t drink to excess, didn’t forget to put on his clothes before going out in the morning, didn’t talk to people who weren’t there, and so she assumed he was all right. She assumed, in other words, that something was wrong with her. That at some point this something had simply caused Danforth to stop loving her.

She had spent the last six months or so trying to face the bleak prospect of the thirty or even forty loveless years which lay ahead of her as this man’s mate, this man who had become by turns angry, coldly sarcastic, and unmindful of her. She had become just another piece of furniture as far as Danforth was concerned… unless, of course, she got in his way. If she did that-if his supper wasn’t ready for him when he was ready for it, if the floor in his study looked dirty to him, even if the sections of the newspaper were in the wrong order when he came to the breakfast table he called her dumb. He told her that if her ass fell off, she wouldn’t know where to find it. He said that if brains were black powder, she wouldn’t be able to blow her nose without a blasting cap. At first she had tried to defend herself from these tirades, but he cut her defenses apart as if they were the walls of a child’s cardboard castle.

If she grew angry in turn, he overtopped her into white rages that terrified her. So she had given anger up and had descended into dooms of bewilderment instead. These days she only smiled helplessly in the face of his anger, promised to do better, and went to their room, where she lay on the bed and wept and wondered whatever was to become of her and wished-wished-wished that she had a friend she could talk to.

She talked to her dolls instead. She’d started collecting them during the first few years of her marriage, and had always kept them in boxes in the attic. During the last year, though, she had brought them down to the sewing room, and sometimes, after her tears were shed, she crept into the sewing room and played with them. They never shouted. They never ignored. They never asked her how she got so stupid, did it come naturally or did she take lessons.

She had found the most wonderful doll of all yesterday, in the new shop.

And today everything had changed.

This morning, to be exact.

Her hand crept under the table and she pinched herself (not for the first time) just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. But after the pinch she was still here in Maurice, sitting in a bar of bright October sunshine, and Danforth was still there, across the table from her, eating with hearty good appetite, his face wreathed in a smile that looked almost alien to her, because she hadn’t seen one there in such a long time.

She didn’t know what had caused the change and was afraid to ask.

She knew he had gone off to Lewiston Raceway last night, just as he almost always did during the evening (presumably because the people he met there were more interesting than the people he met every day in Castle Rock-his wife, for instance), and when she woke up this morning, she expected to find his half of the bed empty (or not slept in at all, which would mean that he had spent the rest of the night dozing in his study chair) and to hear him downstairs, muttering to himself in his bad-tempered way.

Instead, he had been in bed beside her, wearing the striped red pajamas she had given him for Christmas last year. This was the first time she had ever seen him wear them-the first time they’d been out of the box, as far as she knew. He was awake. He rolled over on his side to face her, already smiling. At first the smile frightened her. She thought it might mean he was getting ready to kill her.

Then he touched her breast and winked. “Want to, Myrt? Or is it too early in the day for you?”

So they had made love, for the first time in over five months they had made love, and he had been absolutely magnificent, and now here they were, lunching at Maurice on an early Sunday afternoon like a pair of young lovers. She didn’t know what had happened to work this wondrous change in her husband, and didn’t care. She only wanted to enjoy it, and to hope it would last.

“Everything okay, Myrt?” Keeton asked, looking up from his plate and scrubbing vigorously at his face with his napkin.

She reached shyly across the table and touched his hand.

“Everything’s fine. Everything is just… just wonderful.”

She had to take her hand away so she could dab hastily at her eyes with her napkin.

2

Keeton went on chowing into his hoof borgnine, or whatever it was the Froggies called it, with great appetite. The reason for his happiness was simple. Every horse he had picked yesterday afternoon with the help of Winning Ticket had come in for him last night. Even Malabar, the thirty-to-one shot in the tenth race. He had come back to Castle Rock not so much driving as floating on air, with better than eighteen thousand dollars stuffed into his overcoat pockets. His bookie was probably still wondering where the money went. Keeton knew; it was safely tucked away in the back of his study closet. It was in an envelope. The envelope was in the Winning Ticket box, along with the precious game itself.

He had slept well for the first time in months, and when he woke up, he had a glimmering of an idea about the audit. A glimmering wasn’t much, of course, but it was better than the confused darkness that had been roaring through his head since that awful letter came.

All he had needed to get his brain out of neutral, it seemed, was one winning night at the track.

He could not make total restitution before the axe fell, that much was clear. Lewiston Raceway was the only track which ran nightly during the fall season, for one thing, and it was pretty small potatoes. He could tour the local county fairs and make a few thousand at the races there, but that wouldn’t be enough, either.

Nor could he risk many nights like last night, even at the Raceway.

His bookie would grow wary, then refuse to accept his bets at all.

But he believed he could make partial restitution and minimize the size of the fiddles at the same time. He could also spin a tale.

A sure-fire development prospect that hadn’t come off. A terrible mistake… but one for which he had taken complete responsibility and for which he was now making good. He could point out that a really unscrupulous man, if placed in such a position as this, might well have used the grace period to scoop even more money out of the town treasury-as much as he possibly could-and then to run for a place (some sunny place with lots of palm trees and lots of white beaches and lots of young girls in string bikinis) from which extradition was difficult or downright impossible.

He could wax Christlike and invite those among them without sin to cast the first stone. That should give them pause. If there was a man-jack among them who had not had his fingers in the state pie from time to time, Keeton would eat that man’s shorts.

Without salt.

They would have to give him time. Now that he was able to set his hysteria aside and think the situation over rationally, he was almost sure they would. After all, they were politicians, too. They would know that the press would have plenty of tar and feathers left over for them, the supposed guardians of the public trust, once they had finished with Dan Keeton. They would know the questions which would surface in the wake of a public investigation or even (God forbid) a trial for embezzlement. Questions like how longin fiscal years, if you please, gentlemen-had Mr. Keeton’s little operation been going on?

Questions like how come the State Bureau of Taxation hadn’t awakened and smelled the coffee some time ago? Questions ambitious men would find distressing.

He believed he could squeak through. No guarantees, but it looked possible.

All thanks to Mr. Leland Gaunt.

God, he loved Leland Gaunt.

“Danforth?” Myrt asked shyly.

He looked up. “Hmmm?”

“This is the nicest day I’ve had in years. I just wanted you to know that. How grateful I am to have such a nice day. With you.”

“Oh!” he said. The oddest thing had just happened to him. For a moment he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the woman sitting across from him. “Well, Myrt, it’s been nice for me, too.”

“Will you be going to the race-track tonight?”

“No,” he said, “I think tonight I’ll stay home.”

“That’s nice,” she said. She found it so nice, in fact, that she had to dab at her eyes with her napkin again.

He smiled at her-it wasn’t his old sweet smile, the one which had wooed and won her to begin with-but it was close. “Say, Myrt!

Want dessert?”

She giggled and flapped her napkin at him. “Oh, you!”

3

The Keeton home was a split-level ranch in Castle View. It was a long walk uphill for Nettle Cobb, and by the time she got there her legs were tired and she was very cold. She met only three or four other pedestrians, and none of them looked at her; they were bundled deep into the collars of their coats, for the wind had begun to blow strongly and it had a keen edge. An ad supplement from someone’s Sunday Telegram danced across the street, then took off into the hard blue sky like some strange bird as she turned into the Keetons’ driveway. Mr. Gaunt had told her that Buster and Myrtle wouldn’t be home, and Mr. Gaunt knew best. The garage door was up, and that showboat of a Cadillac Buster drove was gone.

Nettle went up the walk, stopped at the front door, and took the pad and the Scotch tape from her left-hand coat pocket. She very much wanted to be home with the Sunday Super Movie on TV and Raider at her feet. And that’s where she would be as soon as she finished this chore. She might not even bother with her knitting. She might just sit there with her carnival glass lampshade in her lap. She tore off the first pink slip and taped it over the sign by the doorbell, the embossed one which said T H E K E E T O N s and NO SALESMEN, PLEASE.

She put the tape and the pad back in her left pocket, then took the key from her right and slipped it into the lock. Before turning it, she briefly examined the pink slip she had just taped up.

Cold and tired as she was, she just had to smile a little. It really was a pretty good joke, especially considering the way Buster drove.

It was a wonder he hadn’t killed anyone. She wouldn’t like to be the man whose name was signed at the bottom of the warning-slip, though. Buster could be awfully grouchy. Even as a child he hadn’t been one to take a joke.

She turned the key. The lock opened easily. Nettle went inside.

4

“More coffee?” Keeton asked.

“Not for me,” Myrtle said. “I’m as full as a tick.” She smiled.

“Then let’s go home. I want to watch the Patriots on TV.” He glanced at his watch. “If we hurry, I think I can make the kick-off.”

Myrtle nodded, happier than ever. The TV was in the living room, and if Dan meant to watch the game, he wasn’t going to spend the afternoon cooped up in his study. “Let’s hurry, then,” she said.

Keeton held up one commanding finger. “Waiter? Bring me the check, please.”

5

Nettle had stopped wanting to hurry home; she liked being in Buster and Myrtle’s house.

For one thing, it was warm. For another, being here gave Nettle an unexpected sense of power-it was like seeing behind the scenes of two actual human lives. She began by going upstairs and looking through all the rooms. There were a lot of them, too, considering there were no children, but, as her mother had always been fond of saying, them that has, gets.

She opened Myrtle’s bureau drawers, investigating her underwear.

Some of it was silk, quality stuff, but to Nettle most of the good things looked old. The same was true of the dresses hung on her side of the closet. Nettle went on to the bathroom, where she inventoried the pills in the medicine cabinet, and from there to the sewing room, where she admired the dolls. A nice house. A lovely house. Too bad the man who lived here was a piece of shit.

Nettle glanced at her watch and supposed she should start putting up the little pink slips. And she would, too. just as soon as she finished looking around downstairs.

6

“Danforth, isn’t this a little too fast?” Myrtle asked breathlessly as they swung around a slow-moving pulp truck. An oncoming car blared its horn at them as Keeton swung back into his lane.

“I want to make the kick-off,” he said, and turned left onto the Maple Sugar Road, passing a sign which read CASTLE ROCK 8 MILES.

7

Nettle snapped on the TV-the Keetons had a big color Mitsubishi-and watched some of the Sunday Super Movie. Ava Gardner was in it, and Gregory Peck. Gregory seemed to be in love with Ava, although it was hard to tell; it might be the other woman he was in love with. There had been a nuclear war. Gregory Peck drove a submarine. None of this interested Nettle very much, so she turned off the TV, taped a pink slip to the screen, and went into the kitchen.

She looked at what was in the cupboards (the dishes were Corelle, very nice, but the pots and pans were nothing to write home about), then checked the refrigerator. She wrinkled her nose. Too many leftovers.

Too many leftovers was a sure sign of slipshod housekeeping. Not that Buster would know; she’d bet her boots on that. Men like Buster Keeton wouldn’t be able to find their way around the kitchen with a map and a guide-dog.

She checked her watch again and started. She had spent an awfully long time wandering around the house. Too long. Quickly, she began to tear off slips of pink paper and tape them to things-the refrigerator, the stove, the telephone which hung on the kitchen wall by the garage doorway, the breakfront in the dining room.

And the more quickly she worked, the more nervous she became.

8

Nettle had just gotten down to business when Keeton’s red Cadillac crossed the Tin Bridge and started up Watermill Lane toward Castle View.

“Danforth?” Myrtle asked suddenly. “Could you let me out at Amanda Williams’s house? I know it’s a little out of the way, but she’s got my fondue pot. I thought-” The shy smile came and went on her face again. “I thought I might make you-us-a little treat.

For the football game. You could just drop me off.”

He opened his mouth to tell her the Williamses’ was a lot out of his way, the game was about to start, and she could get her goddam fondue pot tomorrow. He didn’t like cheese when it was hot and runny anyway. The goddamned stuff was probably full of bacteria.

Then he thought better of it. Aside from himself, the Board of Selectmen was made up of two dumb bastards and one dumb bitch.

Mandy Williams was the bitch. Keeton had been at some pains to see Bill Fullerton, the town barber, and Harry Samuels, Castle Rock’s only mortician, on Friday. He was also at pains to make these seem like casual calls, but they weren’t. There was always the possibility that the Board of Taxation had begun sending them letters as well. He had satisfied himself that they were not-not yet, at least-but the Williams bitch had been out of town on Friday.

“All right,” he said, then added: “You might ask her if any town business has come to her attention. Anything I should get in touch with her about.”

“Oh, honey, you know I can never keep that stuff straight-”

“I do know that, but you can ask, can’t you? You’re not too dumb to ask, are you?”

“No,” she said hastily, in a small voice.

He parted her hand. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him with a wonderstruck expression. He had apologized to her. Myrtle thought he might have done this at some time or other in their years of marriage, but she could not remember when.

“Just ask her if the State boys have been bothering about anything lately,” he said. “Land-use regulations, the damn sewage… taxes, maybe. I’d come in and ask myself, but I really want to catch the kick-off.”

“All right, Dan.”

The Williams house was halfway up Castle View. Keeton piloted the Cadillac into the driveway and parked behind the woman’s car.

It was foreign, of course. A Volvo. Keeton guessed she was a closet Communist, a lesbo, or both.

Myrtle opened her door and got out, flashing him the shy, slightly nervous smile again as she did so.

“I’ll be home in half an hour.”

“Fine. Don’t forget to ask if she’s aware of any new town business,” he said. And if Myrt’s description-garbled though it would surely b f what Amanda Williams said raised even one single hackle on Keeton’s neck, he would check in with the bitch personally… tomorrow. Not this afternoon. This afternoon was his.

He was feeling much too good to even look at Amanda Williams, let alone make chitchat with her.

He hardly waited for Myrtle to close her door before throwing the Cadillac in reverse and backing down to the street again.

9

Nettle had just taped the last of the pink sheets to the door of the closet in Keeton’s study when she heard a car turn into the driveway.

A muffled squeak escaped her throat. For a moment she was frozen in place, unable to move.

Caught! her mind screamed as she listened to the soft, wellpadded burble of the Cadillac’s big engine. Caught! Oh jesus Savior meek and mild I’m caught! He’ll kill me!

Mr. Gaunt’s voice spoke in answer. It was not friendly now; it was cold and it was commanding and it came from a place deep in the center of her brain. He probably WILL kill you if he catches you, Nettle. And if you panic, he’ll catch you for sure. The answer is simple: don’t panic. Leave the room. Do it now. Don’t run, hut walk fast. And as quietly as you can.

She hurried across the second-hand Turkish rug on the study floor, her legs as stiff as sticks, muttering “Mr. Gaunt knows best” in a low litany, and entered the living room. Pink rectangles of paper glared at her from what seemed like every available surface.

One even dangled from the central light-fixture on a long strand of tape.

Now the car’s engine had taken on a hollow, echoey sound.

Buster had driven into the garage.

Go, Nettle! Go right away! Now is your only chance!

She fled across the living room, tripped over a hassock, and went sprawling. She banged her head on the floor almost hard enough to knock herself out-would have knocked herself out, almost certainly, but for the thin cushion of a throw-rug. Bright globular lights skated across her field of vision. She scrambled up again, vaguely aware that her forehead was bleeding, and began fumbling at the knob of the front door as the car engine cut off in the garage. She cast a terrified glance back over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. She could see the door to the garage, the door he would come through. One of the pink slips of paper was taped to it.

The doorknob turned under her hand, but the door wouldn’t open.

It seemed stuck shut.

From the garage came a hefty swoop-chunk as Keeton slammed his car door. Then the rattle of the motorized garage door starting down on its tracks. She heard his footsteps gritting across the concrete.

Buster was whistling.

Nettle’s frantic gaze, partially obscured by blood from her cut forehead, fell upon the thumb-bolt. It had been turned. That was why the door wouldn’t open for her. She must have turned it herself when she came in, although she couldn’t remember doing it. She flicked it up, pulled the door open, and stepped through.

Less than a second later, the door between the garage and the kitchen opened. Danforth Keeton stepped inside, unbuttoning his overcoat. He stopped. The whistle died on his lips. He stood there with his hands frozen in the act of undoing one of the lower coatbuttons, his lips still pursed, and looked around the kitchen. His eyes began to widen.

If he had gone to the living-room window right then, he would have seen Nettle running wildly across his lawn, her unbuttoned coat billowing around her like the wings of a bat. He might not have recognized her, but he would surely have seen it was a woman, and this might have changed later events considerably. The sight of all those pink slips froze him in place, however, and in his first shock his mind was capable of producing two words and two words only. They flashed on and off inside his head like a giant neon sign with letters of screaming scarlet: THE PERSECUTORS! THE PERSECUTORS! THE PERSECUTORS!

10

Nettle reached the sidewalk and ran down Castle View as fast as she could. The heels of her loafers rattled a frightened tattoo, and her ears convinced her that she was hearing more feet than her own-Buster was behind her, Buster was chasing her, and when Buster caught her he might hurt her… but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because he could do worse than just hurt her. Buster was an important man in town, and if he wanted her sent back to juniper Hill, she would be sent. So Nettle ran. Blood trickled down her forehead and into her eye, and for a moment she saw the world through a pale red lens, as if all the nice houses on the View had begun to ooze blood.

She wiped it away with the sleeve of her coat and went on running.

The sidewalk was deserted, and most eyes inside the houses which were occupied this early Sunday afternoon were trained on the Patriots-jets game. Nettle was seen by only one person.

Tansy Williams, fresh from two days in Portland where she and her mommy had gone to visit Grampa, was looking out the livingroom window, sucking a lollypop and holding her teddy bear, Owen, under her left arm, when Nettle went by with wings on her heels.

“Mommy, a lady just ran by,” Tansy reported.

Amanda Williams was sitting in the kitchen with Myrtle Keeton.

They each had a cup of coffee. The fondue pot sat between them on the table. Myrtle had just asked if there was any town business going on that Dan should know about, and Amanda considered this a very odd question. If Buster wanted to know something, why hadn’t he come in himself? For that matter, why such a question on a Sunday afternoon in the first place?

“Honey, Mommy’s talking with Mrs. Keeton.”

“She had blood on her,” Tansy reported further.

Amanda smiled at Myrtle. “I told Buddy that if he was going to rent that Fatal Attraction, he should wait until Tansy was in bed to watch it.”

Meantime, Nettle went on running. When she reached the intersection of Castle View and Laurel, she had to stop for awhile.

The Public Library was here, and there was a curved stone wall running around its lawn. She leaned against it, gasping and sobbing for breath as the wind tore past her, tugging at her coat. Her hands were pressed against her left side, where she had a deep stitch.

She looked back up the hill and saw that the street was empty.

Buster had not been following her after all; that had just been her imagination. After a few moments she was able to hunt through her coat pockets for a Kleenex to wipe away some of the blood on her face.

She found one, and she also discovered that the key to Buster’s house was no longer there. It might have fallen out of her pocket as she ran down the hill, but she thought it more likely that she had left it in the lock of the front door. But what did that matter? She had gotten out before Buster saw her, that was the important thing. She thanked God that Mr. Gaunt’s voice had spoken to her in the nick of time, forgetting that Mr. Gaunt was the reason she had been in Buster’s home in the first place.

She looked at the smear of blood on the Kleenex and decided the cut probably wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The flow seemed to be slowing down. The stitch in her side was going away, too. She pushed off the rock wall and began to plod toward home with her head down, so the cut wouldn’t show.

Home, that was the thing to think about. Home and her beautiful carnival glass lampshade. Home and the Sunday Super Movie.

Home and Raider. When she was at home with the door locked, the shades pulled, the TV on, and Raider sleeping at her feet, all of this would seem like a horrible dream-the sort of dream she’d had in juniper Hill, after she had killed her husband.

Home, that was the place for her.

Nettle walked a little faster. She would be there soon.

11

Pete and Wilma jerzyck had a light lunch with the Pulaskis after Mass, and following lunch, Pete and jake Pulaski settled in front of the TV to watch the Patriots kick some New York ass. Wilma cared not a fig for football-baseball, basketball, or hockey, either, as far as that went. The only pro sport she liked was wrestling, and although Pete didn’t know it, Wilma would have left him in the wink of an eye for Chief jay Strongbow.

She helped Frieda with the dishes, then said she was going home to watch the rest of the Sunday Super Movie-it was On the Beach, with Gregory Peck. She told Pete she was taking the car.

“That’s fine,” he said, his eyes never leaving the TV. “I don’t mind walking.”

“Goddam good thing for you,” she muttered under her breath as she went out.

Wilma was actually in a good mood, and the major reaion had to do with Casino Nite. Father John wasn’t backing down on it the way Wilma had expected him to do, and she had liked the way he’d looked that morning during the homily, which was called “Let Us Each Tend Our Own Garden.” His tone had been as mild as ever, but there had been nothing mild about his blue eyes or his outthrust chin. Nor had all his fancy gardening metaphors fooled Wilma or anyone else about what he was saying: if the Baptists insisted on sticking their collective nose into the Catholic carrot-patch, they were going to get their collective ass kicked.

The thought of kicking ass (particularly on this scale) always put Wilma in a good mood.

Nor was the prospect of ass-kicking the only pleasure of Wilma’s Sunday. She hadn’t had to cook a heavy Sunday meal for once, and Pete was safely parked with jake and Frieda. If she was lucky, he would spend the whole afternoon watching men try to rupture each other’s spleens and she could watch the movie in peace. But first she thought she might call her old friend Nettle. She thought she had Crazy Nettle pretty well buffaloed, and that was all very well… for a start. But only for a start. Nettle still had those muddy sheets to pay for, whether she knew it or not. The time had come to put a few more moves on Miss Mental Illness of 1991. This prospect filled Wilma with anticipation, and she drove home as fast as she could.

12

Like a man in a dream, Danforth Keeton walked to his refrigerator and pulled off the pink slip which had been taped there. The words

were printed across the top in black block letters. Below these words was the following message: just a warning-but please read and heed!

You have been observed breaking one or more traffic laws. The citing officer has elected to “let you off with a warning” this time, but he has recorded the make, model, and license number of your car, and next time you will be charged. Please remember that traffic laws are for EVERYBODY.

Drive defensively!

Arrive alive!

Your Local Police Department thanks you!

Below the sermon was a series of blanks labelled MAKE, MODEL, and LIC. #. Printed on the slip in the first two blanks were the words Cadillac and Seville. Neatly printed in the blank for LIC. # was this:

Most of the slip was taken up by a checklist of common traffic violations such as failure to signal, failure to stop, and illegal parking.

None of them was checked. Toward the bottom were the words OTHER VIOLATION(S), followed by two blank lines. OTHER VIOLATION(S) had been checked. The message on the lines provided to describe the violation was also neatly printed in small block capitals. It read:

BEING THE BIGGEST COCKSUCKER IN CASTLE ROCK.

At the bottom was a line with the words CITING OFFICER printed under it. The rubber-stamp signature on this line was Norris Ridgewick.

Slowly, very slowly, Keeton clenched his fist on the pink slip.

It crackled and bent and crumpled. At last it disappeared between Keeton’s big knuckles. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the other pink slips. A vein beat time in the center of his forehead.

“I’ll kill him,” Keeton whispered. “I swear to God and all the saints I’ll kill that skinny little fuck.”

13

When Nettle arrived home it was only twenty past one, but it felt to her as if she had been gone for months, maybe even years. As she walked up the cement path to her door, her terrors slipped from her shoulders like invisible weights. Her head still ached from the tumble she had taken, but she thought a headache was a very small price to pay for being allowed to arrive back at her own little house safe and undetected.

She still had her own key; that was in the pocket of her dress.

She took it out and put it in the lock. “Raider?” she called as she turned it. “Raider, I’m home!”

She opened the door.

“Where’s Mummy’s wittle boy, hmmm? Where is urns? Izzum hungwy?”

The hallway was dark, and at first she did not see the small bundle lying on the floor. She took her key out of the lock and stepped in.

“Is Mummy’s wittle boy awful hungwy? Izzum just sooo hung-” Her foot struck something which was both stiff and yielding, and her voice halted in mid-simper. She looked down and saw Raider.

At first she tried to tell herself she wasn’t seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing-wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t. That wasn’t Raider on the floor with something sticking out of his chest-how could it be?

She closed the door and beat frantically at the wall-switch with one hand. At last the hall light jumped on and she saw. Raider was lying on the floor. He was lying on his back the way he did when he wanted to be scratched, and there was something red jutting out of him, something that looked like… looked like…

Nettle uttered a high, wailing scream-it was so high it sounded like the whine of some huge mosquito-and fell on her knees beside her dog.

“Raider! Oh jesus Savior meek and mild! Oh my God, Raider, you ain’t dead, are you? You ain’t dead?”

Her hand-her cold, cold hand-beat at the red thing sticking out of Raider’s chest the way it had beat at the light-switch a few seconds before. At last it caught hold and she tore it free, using a strength drawn from the deepest wells of her grief and horror. The corkscrew came out with a thick ripping sound, pulling chunks of flesh, small clots of blood, and tangles of hair with it. It left a ragged dark hole the size of a four-ten slug. Nettle shrieked. She dropped the gory corkscrew and gathered the small, stiff body in her arms.

“Raider!” she cried. “Oh my little doggy! No! Oh no!” She rocked him back and forth against her breast, trying to bring him back to life with her warmth, but it seemed she had no warmth to give.

She was cold. Cold.

Some time later she put his body down on the hall floor again and fumbled around with her hand until she found the Swiss Army knife with the murdering corkscrew jutting out of its handle. She picked it up dully, but some of that dullness left her when she saw that a note had been impaled upon the murder weapon. She pulled it off with numb fingers and held it up close in front of her. The paper was stiff with her poor little dog’s blood, but she could still read the words scrawled on it:

NOBODY SLINGS MUD AT MY CLEAN SHEETS! I TOLD YOU I’D GET YOU!

The look of distracted grief and horror slowly left Nettle’s eyes.

It was replaced with a gruesome sort of intelligence that sparkled there like tarnished silver. Her cheeks, which had gone as pale as milk when she finally understood what had happened here, began to fill with dark red color. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. She bared them at the note. Two harsh words slid out of her open mouth, hot and hoarse and rasping: “You… bitch!”

She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it against the wall.

It bounced back and landed near Raider’s body. Nettle pounced upon it, picked it up, and spat on it. Then she threw it away again.

She got up and walked slowly down to the kitchen, her hands opening, snapping shut into fists, then springing open only to snap shut again.

14

Wilma jerzyck drove her little yellow Yugo into her driveway, got out, and walked briskly toward the front door, digging in her purse for her housekey. She was humming “Love Makes the World Go Round” under her breath. She found the key, put it in the lock… and then paused as some random movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked to her right, and gaped at what she saw.

The living-room curtains were fluttering in the brisk afternoon wind. They were fluttering outside the house. And the reason they were fluttering outside the house was that the big picture window, which had cost the Clooneys four hundred dollars to replace when their idiot son had broken it with a baseball three years ago, was shattered.

Long arrows of glass pointed inward from the frame toward the central hole.

“What the fuck?” Wilma cried, and turned the key in the lock so hard she almost broke it off.

She rushed indoors, grabbing the door to slam it shut behind her, and then froze in place. For the first time in her adult life, Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck was shocked to complete immobility.

The living room was a shambles. The TV-their beautiful bigscreen TV on which they still owed eleven payments-was shattered. The innards were black and smoking. The picture-tube lay in a thousand shiny fragments on the carpet. Across the room, a huge hole had been knocked in one of the living-room walls. A large package, shaped like a loaf, lay below this hole. Another lay in the doorway to the kitchen.

She closed the door and approached the object in the doorway.

One part of her mind, not quite coherent, told her to be very careful-it might be a bomb. As she passed the TV, she caught a hot, unpleasant aroma-a cross between singed insulation and burned bacon.

She squatted down by the package in the doorway and saw it wasn’t a package at all-at least, not in any ordinary sense. It was a rock with a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped around it and held in place with a rubber band. She pulled the paper out and read this message: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING When she had read it twice, she looked at the other rock. She went over to it and pulled off the sheet of paper rubber-banded to it.

Identical paper, identical message. She stood up, holding one wrinkled sheet in each hand, looking from one to the other again and again, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a hotly contested Ping-Pong match. Finally she spoke three words: “Nettle. That cunt.”

She walked into the kitchen and drew in breath over her teeth in a harsh, whistling gasp. She cut her hand on a sliver of glass taking the rock out of the microwave and picked the splinter absently out of her palm before removing the paper banded to the rock. It bore the same message.

Wilma walked quickly through the other rooms downstairs and observed more damage. She took all the notes. They were all the same.

Then she walked back to the kitchen. She looked at the damage unbelievingly.

“Nettle,” she said again.

At last the iceberg of shock around her was beginning to melt.

The first emotion to replace it was not anger but incredulity.

My, she thought, that woman really must be crazy. She really must, if she thought she could do something like this to me-to me!-and live to see the sun go down. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Rebecca of Fuckybrook Farm?

Wilma’s hand closed on the notes in a spasm. She bent over and rubbed the crumpled carnation of paper sticking out of her fist briskly over her wide bottom.

“I wipe my fucking ass on your last warning!” she cried, and threw the papers away.

She looked around the kitchen again with the wondering eyes of a child. A hole in the microwave. A big dent in the Amana refrigerator.

Broken glass all over. In the other room the TV, which had cost them almost sixteen hundred dollars, smelled like a FryO-Lator full of hot dogshit. And who had done it all? Who?

Why, Nettle Cobb had done it, that was who. Miss Mental Illness of 1991.

Wilma began to smile.

A person who did not know Wilma might have mistaken it for a gentle smile, a kindly smile, a smile of love and good fellowship.

Her eyes shone with some powerful emotion; the unwary might have mistaken it for exaltation. But if Peter jerzyck, who knew her best, had seen her face at that moment, he would have run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him.

“No,” Wilma said in a soft, almost caressing voice. “Oh, no, babe. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it means to fuck with Wilma. You don’t have the slightest idea what it means to fuck with Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck.”

Her smile widened.

“But you will.”

Two magnetized steel strips had been mounted on the wall near the microwave. Most of the knives which had hung from these strips had been knocked loose by the rock Brian had pegged into the RadarRange; they lay on the counter in a pick-up-sticks jumble.

Wilma picked out the longest, a lcngsford carving knife with a white bone handle, and slowly ran her wounded palm along the side of the blade, smearing the cutting edge with blood.

“I’m going to teach you everything you need to know.”

Holding the knife in her fist, Wilma strode across the living room, crunching glass from the broken window and the TV picturetube under the low heels of her black for-church shoes. She went out the door without closing it and cut across her lawn in the direction of Ford Street.

15

At the same time Wilma was selecting a knife from the clutter of them on the counter, Nettle Cobb was pulling a meat-cleaver from one of her kitchen drawers. She knew it was sharp, because Bill Fullerton down at the barber shop had put an edge on it for her less than a month ago.

Nettle turned and walked slowly down the hallway toward her front door. She stopped and knelt for a moment beside Raider, her poor little dog who had never done anything to anyone.

“I warned her,” she said softly as she stroked Raider’s fur. “I warned her, I gave that crazy Polish woman every chance. I gave her every chance in the world. My dear little doggy. You wait for me.

You wait, because I’ll be with you soon.”

She got up and went out of her house, bothering with the door no more than Wilma had bothered with hers. Security had ceased to interest Nettle. She stood on the stoop for a moment, taking deep breaths, then cut across her lawn in the direction of Willow Street.

16

Danforth Keeton ran into his study and ripped open the closet door. He crawled all the way to the back. For a terrible moment he thought the game was gone, that the goddam intruding persecuting motherfucker Deputy Sheriff had taken it, and his future along with it.

Then his hands fell upon the box and he tore back the lid. The tin race-track was still there. And the envelope was still tucked beneath it. He bent it back and forth, listening to the bills crackle inside, and then replaced it.

He hurried to the window, looking out for Myrtle. She mustn’t see the pink slips. He had to take them all down before Myrtle got back, and how many were there? A hundred? He looked around his study and saw them stuck up everywhere. A thousand? Yes, maybe. Maybe a thousand. Even two thousand did not seem entirely out of the question.

Well, if she got here before he was done cleaning up, she would just have to wait on the step, because he wasn’t going to let her in until every one of these goddamned persecuting things was burning in the kitchen woodstove. Every… damned… one.

He snatched the slip dangling from the light-fixture. The tape stuck to his cheek and he pawed it away with a little squeal of anger.

On this one, a single word glared up from the line reserved for

OTHER VIOLATION(S):

He ran to the reading lamp by his easy chair. Snatched up the slip taped to the shade.

OTHER VIOLATION(S):

The TV:

HORSE-FUCKING The glass of his Lions Club Good Citizenship Award, mounted above the fireplace: CORNHOLING YOUR MOTHER The kitchen door: COMPULSIVE MONEY-CHUCKING AT LEWISTON RACEWAY The door to the garage: PSYCHOTIC GARBAGE-HEAD PARANOIA He gathered them up as fast as he could, eyes wide and bulging from his fleshy face, his thinning hair standing up in wild disarray.

He was soon panting and coughing, and an ugly reddish-purple color began to overspread his cheeks. He looked like a fat child with a grown-up’s face on some strange, desperately important treasure hunt.

He pulled one from the front of the china closet: STEALING FROM THE TOWN PENSION FUND TO PLAY THE PONIES Keeton hurried into his study with a pile of slips clutched in his right hand, strands of tape flying back from his fist, and began to pluck up more of the slips. The ones in here all stuck to a single subject, and with horrible accuracy: EMBEZZLEMENT.

MISAPPROPRIATION. BAD STEWARDSHIP. EMBEZZLEMENT. That word most of all, glaring, shouting, accusing:

He thought he heard something outside and ran to the window again.

Maybe it was Myrtle. Maybe it was Norris Ridgewick, come by to gloat and laugh. If so, Keeton would get his gun and shoot him. But not in the head. No. In the head would be too good, too quick, for scum like Ridgewick. Keeton would guthole him, and leave him to scream himself to death on the lawn.

But it was only the Garsons’ Scout, trundling down the View toward town. Scott Garson was the town’s most important banker.

Keeton and his wife sometimes took dinner with the Garsonsthey were nice people, and Garson himself was politically important.

What would he think if he saw these slips? What would he think of that word, EMBEZZLEMENT, screaming off the pink violation slips again and again, screaming like a woman being raped in the middle of the night?

He ran back into the dining room, panting. Had he missed any?

He didn’t think so. He’d gotten them all, at least down lieNo!

There was one! Right on the newel post of the stairway!

What if he had missed that one? My God!

He ran to it, snatched it up.

MAKE: SHITMOBILE MODEL: OLD AND WEARY LIC. #: OLDFUCK I OTHER VIOLATION(S): FINANCIAL FAGGOTRY

More? Were there more? Keeton coursed through the downstairs rooms at a dead run. His shirttail had come out of his pants and his hairy belly was bobbling wildly over his beltbuckle. He saw no more… at least not down here.

After another quick, frantic look out the window to make sure Myrt wasn’t yet in sight, he pelted upstairs with his heart thundering in his chest.

17

Wilma and Nettle met on the corner of Willow and Ford. There they halted, staring at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti Western.

The wind flapped their coats briskly to and fro. The sun shuttered in and out of the clouds; their shadows came and went like fitful visitors.

No traffic moved on either of these two streets, or on the sidewalks. They owned this little corner of the autumn afternoon.

You killed my dog, you bitch!”

’You broke my TV! You broke my windows! You broke my microwave, you crazy cunt!”

“I warned you!”

“Stick your warning up your old dirt road!”

“I’m going to kill you!”

“Take one step and someone’s going to die here, all right, but it won’t be me!”

Wilma spoke these words with alarm and dawning surprise; Nettle’s face made her realize for the first time that the two of them might be about to engage in something a little more serious than pulling hair or ripping clothes. What was Nettle doing here in the first place? What had happened to the element of surprise? How had things come so quickly to the sticking point?

But there was a deep streak of Polish Cossack in Wilma’s nature, a part that found such questions irrelevant. There was a battle to be fought here; that was the important thing.

Nettle ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat.

Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade.

As Nettle closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettle’s bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment’s horror at what she had don other end of the steel buried in Nettle?-and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife’s upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettle’s frantically pumping heart.

“OOOOH YOU BIIIITCH!” Nettle screamed, and brought the cleaver down. It buried itself to the hilt in Wilma’s shoulder, splitting the collarbone with a dull crunch.

The pain, a huge wooden plank of it, drove any objective thought from Wilma’s mind. Only the raving Cossack was left. She yanked her knife free.

Nettle yanked her cleaver free. It took both hands to do it, and when she finally succeeded in wrenching it off the bone, a loose slew of guts slipped from the bloody hole in her dress and hung before her in a glistening knot.

The two women circled slowly, their feet printing tracks in their own blood. The sidewalk began to look like some weird Arthur Murray dance diagram. Nettle felt the world beginning to pulse in and out in great, slow cycles-the color would drain from things, leaving her in a blur of whiteness, and then it would slowly come back. She heard her heart in her ears, great slow snaffling thuds.

She knew she was wounded but felt no pain. She thought Wilma might have cut her a little in the side, or something.

Wilma knew how badly she was hurt; was aware that she could no longer lift her right arm and that the back of her dress was drenched with blood. She had no intention of even trying to run away, however.

She had never run in her life, and she wasn’t going to start now.

“Hi!” someone screamed thinly at them from across the street.

“Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is!

You stop it right now or I’ll call the police!”

Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettle stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma’s hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.

“Hi! Hi!” It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were mag ould it really be Wilma jerzyck on the nified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice: “Help! Police!

Murder! MURRRDURRRRR!”

The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice.

Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettle staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward.

“Come on, you bitch,” she snarled. “Come for me, if you’re coming.”

Nettle came, her mouth working. The ball of her intestines swung back and forth against her dress like a misborn fetus. Her right foot struck Wilma’s outstretched left foot and she fell forward.

The carving knife impaled her just below the breastbone. She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jersyck’s head with a single dull sound-chonk! Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettle’s. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.

“Killed… my… doggy,” Nettle gasped, spitting a fine mist of blood into Wilma’s upturned face with every word. Then she shuddered all over and went limp. Her head honked the post of the stop-sign as it fell forward.

Wilma’s jittering foot slid into the gutter. Her good black forchurch shoe flew off and landed in a pile of leaves with its low heel pointing up at the bustling clouds. Her toes flexed once… once more… and then relaxed.

The two women lay draped over each other like lovers, their blood painting the cinnamon-colored leaves in the gutter.

“MURRRRRDURRRRRR!” the old woman across the street trumpeted again, and then she rocked backward and fell full-length on her own hall floor in a faint.

Others in the neighborhood were coming to windows and opening doors now, asking each other what had happened, stepping out on stoops and lawns, first approaching the scene cautiously, then backing away in a hurry, hands over mouths, when they saw not only what had happened, but the gory extent of it.

Eventually, someone called the Sheriff’s Office.

18

Polly Chalmers was walking slowly up Main Street toward Needful Things with her aching hands bundled into her warmest pair of mittens when she heard the first police siren. She stopped and watched as one of the county’s three brown Plymouth cruisers belted through the intersection of Main and Laurel, lights flashing and twirling. It was doing fifty already and still accelerating. It was closely followed by a second cruiser.

She watched them out of sight, frowning. Sirens and racing police cruisers were a rarity in The Rock. She wondered what had happened-something a little more serious than a cat up a tree, she supposed. Alan would tell her when he called that evening.

Polly looked up the street again and saw Leland Gaunt standing in the doorway of his shop, also watching after the cruisers with an expression of mild curiosity on his face. Well, that answered one question: he was in. Nettle had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn’t surprised Polly much; the surface of Nettle’s mind was slippery, and things had a way of sliding right off.

She walked on up the street. Mr. Gaunt looked around and saw her. His face lit up in a smile.

“Ms. Chalmers! How nice that you could drop by!”

She smiled wanly. The pain, which had abated for awhile that morning, was now creeping back, thrusting its network of thin, cruel wires through the flesh of her hands. “I thought we’d agreed on Polly.”

“Polly, then. Come inside it’s awfully good to see you. What’s all the excitement?”

“I don’t know,” she said. He held the door for her and she went past him into the shop. “I suppose someone’s been hurt and needs to go to the hospital. Medical Assistance in Norway is awfully slow on the weekends. Although why the dispatcher would send two cruisers…”

Mr. Gaunt closed the door behind them. The bell tinkled. The shade on the door was down, and with the sun now going the other way, the interior of Needful Things was gloomy… but, Polly thought, if gloom could ever be pleasant, this gloom was. A small reading lamp shed a golden circle on the counter by Mr. Gaunt’s old-fashioned cash register. A book lay open there. It was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Mr. Gaunt was looking at her closely, and Polly had to smile again at the expression of concern in his eyes.

“My hands have been kicking up the very dickens these last few days,” she said. “I guess I don’t exactly look like Demi Moore.”

“You look like a woman who is very tired and in quite a lot of discomfort,” he said.

The smile on her face wavered. There was understanding and deep compassion in his voice, and for a moment Polly was afraid she might burst into tears. The thought which kept the tears at bay was an odd one: His hands. If I cry, he’ll try to comfort me. He’ll put his hands on me.

She buttressed the smile.

“I’ll survive; I always have. Tell me-did Nettle Cobb happen to drop by?”

“Today?” He frowned. “No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It’s not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?”

“Oh… no reason,” Polly said. “She said she might, but Nettle… Nettle often forgets things.”

“She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life,” Mr. Gaunt said gravely.

“Yes. Yes, she has.” Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine,” Polly said, but it was a lie she wasn’t even within shouting distance of fine.

Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. “You’re not well,” he said decisively. “Therefore I’m going to dispense with the small-talk.

The item which I wrote you about did come in. I’m going to give it to you and send you home.”

“Give it to me?”

“Oh, I’m not offering you a present,” he said as he went behind the cash register. “We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?”

She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding-was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn’t come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.

“This is the sort of item a vendor has to offer on trial-if he’s an ethical man, that is.” He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. “If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you-and I have to tell you that will probably be the case you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price.” He smiled at her. “And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you.”

She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?

He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside.

It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.

“This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramidsgosh, no!-but still very old. There’s something inside it.

Some sort of herb, I think, although I’m not sure.” He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.

“It’s called an azka, or perhaps an azakah,” Mr. Gaunt said.

“Either way, it’s an amulet which is supposed to ward off pain.”

Polly tried a smile. She wanted to be polite, but really. - she had come all the way down here for this? The thing didn’t even have any aesthetic value. It was ugly, not to put too fine a point on it.

“I really don’t think.

“I don’t, either,” he said, “but desperate situations often call for desperate measures. I assure you it is quite genuine… at least in the sense that it wasn’t made in Taiwan. It is an authentic Egyptian artifact-not quite a relic, but an artifact most certainly-from the period of the Later Decline. It comes with a certificate of provenance which identifies it as a tool of benka-litis, or white magic. I want you to take it and wear it. I suppose it sounds silly. Probably it is. But there are stranger things in heaven and earth than some of us dream Of, even in our wilder moments of philosophy.”

“Do you really believe that?” Polly asked.

“Yes. I’ve seen things in my time that make a healing medallion or amulet look perfectly ordinary.” A fugitive gleam flickered momentarily in his hazel eyes. “Many such things. The world’s odd corners are filled with fabulous junk, Polly. But never mind that; you are the issue here.

“Even the other day, when I suspect the pain was not nearly as bad as it is right now, I got a good idea of just how unpleasant your situation had become. I thought this little… item… might be worth a try. After all, what have you to lose? Nothing else you’ve tried has worked, has it?”

“I appreciate the thought, Mr. Gaunt, really I do, but-”

“Leland.

Please.”

“Yes, all right. I appreciate the thought, Leland, but I’m afraid I’m not superstitious.”

She looked up and saw his bright hazel eyes were fixed upon her.

“It doesn’t matter if you are or not, Polly… because this is.”

He wiggled his fingers. The azka bobbed gently at the end of its chain.

She opened her mouth again, but this time no words came out.

She found herself remembering a day last spring. Nettle had forgotten her copy of Inside View when she went home. Leafing through it idly, glancing at stories about werewolf babies in Cleveland and a geological formation on the moon that looked like the face of JFK, Polly had come upon an ad for something called The Prayer Dial of the Ancients. It was supposed to cure headaches, stomach aches, and arthritis.

The ad was dominated by a black-and-white drawing. It showed a fellow with a long beard and a wizard’s hat (either Nostradamus or Gandalf, Polly assumed) holding something that looked like a child’s pinwheel over the body of a man in a wheelchair. The pinwheel gadget was casting a cone of radiance over the invalid, and although the ad did not come right out and say so, the implication seemed to be that the guy would be dancing up a storm at the Copa in a night or two. It was ridiculous, of course, superstitious pap for people whose minds had wavered or perhaps even broken under a steady onslaught of pain and disability, but still…

She had sat looking at that ad for a long time, and, ridiculous as it was, she had almost called the 800 number for phone orders given at the bottom of the page. Because sooner or later"Sooner or later a person in pain should explore even the more questionable paths, if it’s possible those paths might lead to relief,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Isn’t that so?”

“I… I don’t.”

“Cold therapy… thermal gloves… even the radiation treatments… none of them have worked for you, have they?”

“How do you know about all that?”

“A good tradesman makes it his business to know the needs of his customers,” Mr. Gaunt said in his soft, hypnotic voice. He moved toward her, holding the silver chain out in a wide ring with the azka hanging at the bottom. She shrank from the long hands with their leathery nails.

“Fear not, dear lady. I’ll not touch the least hair upon your head.

Not if you’re calm… and remain quite still…”

And Polly did become calm. She did become still. She stood with her hands (still encased in the woolly mittens) crossed demurely in front of her, and allowed Mr. Gaunt to drop the silver chain over her head. He did it with the gentleness of a father turning down his daughter’s bridal veil. She felt far away from Mr. Gaunt, from Needful Things, from Castle Rock, even from herself. She felt like a woman standing high on some dusty plain and under an endless sky, hundreds of miles from any other human being.

The azka dropped against the zipper of her leather car-coat with a small clink.

“Put it inside your jacket. And when you get home, put it inside your blouse, as well. It must be worn next to the skin for maximum effect.”

“I can’t put it in my jacket,” Polly said in slow, dreaming tones.

“The zipper… I can’t pull down the zipper.”

“No? Try.”

So Polly stripped off one of the mittens and tried. To her great surprise, she found she was able to flex the thumb and first finger of her right hand just enough to grasp the zipper’s tab and pull it down.

“There, you see?”

The little silver ball fell against the front of her blouse. It seemed very heavy to her, and the feel of it was not precisely comfortable.

She wondered vaguely what was inside it, what had made that dusty slithery sound. Some sort of herb, he had said, but it hadn’t sounded like leaves or even powder to Polly. It had seemed to her that something in there had shifted on its own.

Mr. Gaunt seemed to understand her discomfort. “You’ll get used to it, and much sooner than you might think. Believe me, you will.”

Outside, thousands of miles away, she heard more sirens. They sounded like troubled spirits.

Mr. Gaunt turned away, and as his eyes left her face, Polly felt her concentration begin to return. She felt a little bewildered, but she also felt good. She felt as if she had just had a short but satisfying nap. Her sense of mixed discomfort and disquiet was gone.

“My hands still hurt,” she said, and this was true… but did they hurt as badly? It seemed to her there had been some relief, but that could be nothing more than suggestion-she had a feeling that Gaunt had imposed a kind of hypnosis on her in his determination to make her accept the azka. Or it might only be the warmth of the shop after the cold outside.

“I doubt very much if the promised effect is instantaneous,” Mr.

Gaunt said dryly. “Give it a chance, though-will you do that, Polly?”

She shrugged. “All right.”

After all, what did she have to lose? The ball was small enough so it would barely make a bulge under a blouse and a sweater. She wouldn’t have to answer any questions about it if no one knew it was there, and that would be just fine with her-Rosalie Drake would be curious, and Alan, who was about as superstitious as a tree-stump, would probably find it funny. As for Nettle… well, Nettle would probably be awed to silence if she knew Polly was wearing an honest-to-goodness magic charm, just like the ones they sold in her beloved Inside View.

“You shouldn’t take it off, not even in the shower,” Mr. Gaunt said. “There’s no need to. The ball is real silver, and won’t rust.”

“But if I do?”

He coughed gently into his hand, as if embarrassed. “Well, the beneficial effect of the azka is cumulative. The wearer is a little better today, a little better still tomorrow, and so on. That’s what I was told, at least.”

Told by whom? she wondered.

“If the azka is removed, however, the wearer reverts to his or her former painful state not slowly but at once, and then has to wait for days or perhaps weeks in order to regain the lost ground once the azka is put back on.”

Polly laughed a little. She couldn’t help it, and was relieved when Leland Gaunt joined her.

“I know how it sounds,” he said, “but I only want to help if I can. Do you believe that?”

“I do,” she said, “and I thank you.”

But as she allowed him to usher her from the shop, she found herself wondering about other things, too. There was the near trance-state she’d been in when he slipped the chain over her head, for instance. Then there was her strong dislike of being touched by him.

Those things were very much at odds with the feelings of friendship, regard, and compassion which he projected like an almost visible aura.

But had he mesmerized her somehow? That was a foolish idea… wasn’t it? She tried to remember exactly what she had felt like when they were discussing the azka, and couldn’t do it. If he had done such a thing, it had no doubt been by accident, and with her help. More likely she had just entered the dazed state which too many Percodans sometimes induced. It was the thing she disliked most about the pills.

No, she guessed that was the thing she disliked second to the most.

What she really hated about them was that they didn’t always work the way they were supposed to anymore.

“I’d drive you home, if I drove,” Mr. Gaunt said, “but I’m afraid I never learned.”

“Perfectly all right,” Polly said. “I appreciate your kindness a great deal.”

“Thank me if it works,” he replied. “Have a lovely afternoon, Polly.”

More sirens rose in the air. They were on the east side of town, over toward Elm, Willow, Pond, and Ford streets. Polly turned in that direction. There was something about the sound of sirens, especially on such a quiet afternoon, which conjured up vaguely threatening thoughts-not quite images-of impending doom. The sound began to die out, unwinding like an invisible clockspring in the bright autumn air.

She turned back to say something about this to Mr. Gaunt, but the door was shut. The sign reading

hung between the drawn shade and the glass, swinging gently back and forth on its string. He had gone back inside while her back was turned, so quietly she hadn’t even heard him.

Polly began to walk slowly home. Before she got to the end of Main Street another police car, this one a State Police cruiser, blasted past her.

19

“Danforth?”

Myrtle Keeton stepped through the front door and into the living room. She balanced the fondue pot under her left arm as she struggled to remove the key Danforth had left in the lock.

“Danforth, I’m home!”

There was no answer, and the TV wasn’t on. That was strange; he had been so determined to get home in time for the kick-off.

She wondered briefly if he might have gone somewhere else, up to the Garsons’, perhaps, to watch it, but the garage door was down, which meant he had put the car away. And Danforth didn’t walk anywhere if he could possibly avoid it. Especially not up the View, which was steep.

“Danforth? Are you here?”

Still no answer. There was an overturned chair in the dining room. Frowning, she set the fondue pot on the table and righted the chair. The first threads of worry, fine as cobweb, drifted through her mind. She walked toward the study door, which was closed.

When she reached it, she tipped her head against the wood and listened. She was quite sure she could hear the soft squeak of his desk chair.

“Danforth? Are you in there?”

No answer… but she thought she heard a low cough. Worry became alarm. Danforth had been under a great deal of strain lately-he was the only one of the town’s selectmen who worked really hard-and he weighed more than was good for him. What if he’d had a heart attack?

What if he was in there lying on the floor?

What if the sound she had heard was not a cough but the sound of Danforth trying to breathe?

The lovely morning and early afternoon they had spent together made such a thought seem horridly plausible: first the sweet buildup, then the crashing let-down. She reached for the knob of the study door… then drew her hand back and used it to pluck nervously at the loose skin under her throat instead. It had taken only a few blistering occasions to teach her that one did not disturb Danforth in his study without knocking… and that one never, never, never entered his sanctum sanctorum uninvited.

Yes, but if he’s had a heart attack… or… or…

She thought of the overturned chair and fresh alarm coursed through her.

Suppose he came home and surprised a burglar? What if the burglar conked Danforth over the head, knocked him out, and dragged him into his study?

She rapped a flurry of knuckles on the door. “Danforth? Are you all right?”

No answer. No sound in the house but the solemn tick-tock of the grand father clock in the living room, and… yes, she was quite sure of it: the creak of the chair in Danforth’s study.

Her hand began to creep toward the knob again.

“Danforth, are you…”

The tips of her fingers were actually touching the knob when his voice roared out at her, making her leap back from the door with a thin scream.

“Leave me alone! Can’t you leave me alone, you stupid bitch?”

She moaned. Her heart was jackhammering wildly in her throat.

It was not just surprise; it was the rage and unbridled hate in his voice. After the calm and pleasant morning they had spent, he could not have hurt her more if he had caressed her cheek with a handful of razor-blades.

“Danforth… I thought you were hurt. Her voice was a tiny gasp she could hardly hear herself.

“Leave me alone!” Now he was right on the other side of the door, by the sound.

Oh my God, he sounds as if he’s gone crazy. Can that be? How can that be? What’s happened since he dropped me off at Amanda’s?

But there were no answers to these questions. There was only ache. And so she crept away upstairs, got her beautiful new doll from the closet in the sewing room, then went into the bedroom.

She eased off her shoes and then lay down on her side of their bed with the doll in her arms.

Somewhere, far off, she heard conflicting sirens. She paid them no attention.

Their bedroom was lovely at this time of day, full of bright October sunshine. Myrtle did not see it. She saw only darkness.

She felt only misery, a deep, sick misery that not even the gorgeous doll could alleviate. The misery seemed to fill her throat and block her breathing.

Oh she had been so happy today-so very happy. He had been happy, too. She was sure of it. And now things were worse than they had been before. Much worse.

What had happened?

Oh God, what had happened and who was responsible?

Myrtle hugged the doll and looked up at the ceiling and after awhile she began to weep in large, flat sobs that made her whole body quake.