Needful Things

1

The town’s schools were closed for the holiday, but Brian Rusk wouldn’t have gone even if they had been open.

Brian was sick. it wasn’t any kind of physical illness, not measles or chicken pox or even the Hershey Squirts, the most humiliating and debilitating of them all. Nor was it a mental disease, exactly-his mind was involved, all right, but it felt almost as if that involvement were a side-effect. The part of him which had taken sick was deeper inside him than his mind; some essential part of his make-up which was available to no doctor’s needle or microscope had gone gray and ill.

He had always been a sunshiny sort of boy, but that sun was gone now, buried behind heavy banks of cloud which were still building.

The clouds had begun to gather on the afternoon he had thrown the mud at Wilma jerzyck’s sheets, they had thickened when Mr.

Gaunt had come to him in a dream, dressed in a Dodger uniform, and told him he wasn’t done paying for his Sandy Koufax card yet… but the overcast had not become total until he had come down to breakfast this morning.

His father, dressed in the gray fatigues he wore to work at the Dick Perry Siding and Door Company in South Paris, was seated at the kitchen table with the Portland Press-Herald open in front of him.

“Goddam Patriots,” he said from behind his newspaper barricade.

“When the hell are they gonna get a quarterback that can throw the goddam ball?”

“Don’t swear in front of the boys,” Cora said from the stove, but she didn’t speak with her usual exasperated forcefulness-she sounded distant and preoccupied.

Brian slipped into his chair and poured milk on his corn flakes.

“Hey Bri!” Sean said cheerfully. “You wanna go downtown today?

Play some video games?”

“Maybe,” Brian said. “I guess-” Then he saw the headline on the front page of the paper and stopped talking.

DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK “It was a duel,” State Police Source Claims There were photographs of two women, side by side. Brian recognized both of them. One was Nettle Cobb, who lived around the corner on Ford Street. His mom said she was a nut, but she had always seemed okay to Brian. He had stopped a couple of times to pet her dog when she was walking him, and she seemed pretty much like anyone else.

The other woman was Wilma jerzyck.

He poked at his cereal but didn’t actually eat any of it. After his father left for work, Brian dumped the soggy corn flakes into the garbage pail and then crept upstairs to his room. He expected his mother to come cawing after him, asking how come he was throwing away good food while children were starving in Africa (she seemed to believe the thought of starving kids could improve your appetite), but she didn’t; she seemed lost in a world of her own this morning.

Sean was right there, however, bugging him just like always.

“So what do you say, Bri? You want to go downtown? Do you?”

He was almost dancing from one foot to the other in his excitement.

“We could play some video games, maybe check out that new store with all the neat stuff in the window-”

“You stay out of there!” Brian shouted, and his little brother recoiled, a look of shock and dismay spreading over his face.

“Hey,” Brian said, “I’m sorry. But you don’t want to go in there, Sean-o. That place sucks.”

Sean’s lower lip was trembling. “Kevin Pelkey says-”

“Who are you going to believe? That wet end or your own brother? It’s no good, Sean. It’s…” He wet his lips and then said what he understood as the bottom of the truth: “It’s bad.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Sean asked. His voice was fierce and teary.

“You’ve been acting like a dope all weekend! Mom, too!”

“I don’t feel so good, that’s all.”

"Well-”

Sean considered.

Then he brightened.

"Maybe some

video games would make you feel better. We can play Air Raid, Bri!

They got Air Raid! The one where you sit right inside, and it tilts back and forth! It’s awesome!”

Brian considered it briefly. No. He couldn’t imagine going down to the video arcade, not today, maybe not ever again. All the other kids would be there-today you’d have to wait in line to get at the good games like Air Raid-but he was different from them now, and he might always be different.

After all, he had a 1956 Sandy Koufax card.

Still, he wanted to do something nice for Sean, for anyone-something that would make up a little for the monstrous thing he had done to Wilma jerzyck. So he told Sean he might want to play some video games that afternoon, but to take some quarters in the meantime.

Brian shook them out of his big plastic Coke bottle bank.

“Jeepers!” Sean said, his eyes round. “There’s eight… nine… ten quarters here! You really must be sick!”

“Yeah, I guess I must be. Have fun, Sean-o. And don’t tell Mom, or she’ll make you put them back.”

“She’s in her room, moonin around in those dark glasses,” Sean said. “She doesn’t even know we’re alive.” He paused for a moment and then added: “I hate those dark glasses. They’re totally creepy.”

He looked more closely at his big brother. “You really don’t look so great, Bri.”

“I don’t feel so great,” Brian said truthfully. “I think I’ll lie down.”

“Well… I’ll wait for you awhile. See if you feel any better.

I’ll be watchin cartoons on channel fifty-six. Come on down if you feel better.” Sean shook the quarters in his cupped hands.

“I will,” Brian said, and closed his door softly as his little brother walked away.

But he hadn’t felt any better. As the day drew on, he just went on feeling (cloudier) worse and worse. He thought of Mr. Gaunt. He thought of Sandy Koufax. He thought of that glaring newspaper headlineMURDEROUS SPAT LEAVES TWO WOMEN DEAD IN CASTLE ROCK. He thought of those pictures, familiar faces swimming up from clumps of black dots.

Once he almost fell asleep, and then the little record player started up in his mother and father’s bedroom. Mom was playing her scratchy Elvis 45s again. She had been doing it almost all weekend.

Thoughts went whirling and rocking through Brian’s head like bits of clutter caught up in a cyclone.

MURDEROUS SPAT.

“You know they said you was high-class… but that was just a lie… “It was a duel.

MURDEROus: Nettle Cobb, the lady with the dog.

“You ain’t never caught a rabbit… “When you deal with me, you want to remember two things, SPA T: Wilma jerzyck, the lady with the sheets.

Mr. Gaunt knows hest…

“… and you ain’t no friend of mine… and the duelling isn’t done until Mr. Gaunt SAYS it’s done.

Around and around these thoughts went, a jumble of terror, guilt, and misery set to the beat of Elvis Presley’s golden hits. By noon, Brian’s stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could.

His mother didn’t hear. She was still in her room, where Elvis was now telling her he wanted to be her teddy bear.

As Brian walked slowly back to his room, feeling more miserable than ever, a horrible, haunting certainty came to him: his Sandy Koufax card was gone. Someone had stolen it last night while he slept. He had participated in a murder because of that card, and now it was gone.

He broke into a run, almost slipped on the rug in the middle of his bedroom floor, and snatched his baseball-card book from the top of the dresser. He turned through the pages with such terrified speed that he tore several loose from the ring-binders. But the card-the card-was still there: that narrow face looking out at him from beneath its plastic covering on the last page. Still there, and Brian felt a great, miserable relief sweep through him.

He slipped the card from its pocket, went over to the bed, and lay down with it in his hands. He didn’t see how he could ever let go of it again. It was all he had gotten out of this nightmare. The only thing. He didn’t like it anymore, but it was his. If he could have brought Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck back to life by burning it up, he would have been hunting for matches at once (or so he really believed), but he couldn’t bring them back, and since he couldn’t, the thought of losing the card and having nothing at all was insupportable.

So he held it in his hands and looked at the ceiling and listened to the dim sound of Elvis, who had moved on to “Wooden Heart.”

It was not surprising that Sean had told him he looked bad; his face was white, his eyes huge and dark and listless. And his own heart felt pretty wooden, now that he thought about it.

Suddenly a new thought, a really horrible thought, cut across the darkness inside his head with the affrighted, speeding brilliance of a comet: He had been seen!

He sat bolt upright on his bed, staring at himself in the mirror on his closet door with horror. Bright green wrapper! Bright red kerchief over a bunch of hair-rollers! Mrs. Mislaburski!

What’s going on over there, boy?

I don’t know, exactly. I think Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck must be having an argument.

Brian got off his bed and went over to the window, half expecting to see Sheriff Pangborn turning into the driveway in his police cruiser right this minute. He wasn’t, but he would be coming soon. Because when two women killed each other in a murderous spat, there was an investigation. Mrs. Mislaburski would be questioned. And she would say that she had seen a boy at the jerzycks’ house. That boy, she would tell the Sheriff, had been Brian Rusk.

Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn’t pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She)just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer.

“Who is it please?”

Brian thought calmly: He’ll get it out of me. I can’t lie, not to a policeman. I couldn’t even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time.

He’ll get it out of me and I’ll go to jailfor murder.

That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.

“Bri-unnn! Telephone!”

“I don’t want to talk to Stan!” he yelled. “Tell him to call back tomorrow!”

“It’s not Stan,” Sean called back. “It’s a guy. A grown-up.”

Large icy hands seized Brian’s heart and squeezed it. This was it-Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.

Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They’re very serious questions. I’m afraid if you don’t come right down to answer them, I’ll have to come and get you. I’ll have to come in my police car.

Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, “This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb.”

“Huh-huh-who is it?” he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.

“I dunno!” Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. “I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that.”

Crowfix?

Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.

Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.

Not Crowfix.

Koufax.

Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.

He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.

“Hello, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said softly.

“Huh-Huh-Hello,” Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.

“You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Mr. Gaunt said. “If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn’t have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?”

“How do you know about that?” Brian again felt like throwing up.

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they’ll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.

They’ll think you didn’t see him because he was behind the house.”

Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn’t snooping. He wasn’t; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.

“I can’t lie!” he whispered into the telephone. “I always get caught out when I lie!”

“Not this time, Brian,” Mr. Gaunt said. “This time you’re going to do it like a champ.”

And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.

Gaunt knew best about this, too.

2

While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.

Except it wasn’t her bedroom.

When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.

She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet hum of air conditioners (only a few of the windows at Graceland actually opened; many were nailed shut and all were shaded), the whisper of her feet on deep-pile rugs, and the sound of Elvis singing “My Wish Came True” in his haunting, pleading voice. She danced beneath the huge chandelier of French crystal in the dining room and past the trademark stained-glass peacocks. She trailed her hands across the rich blue velvet drapes. The furniture was French Provincial. The walls were blood red.

The scene changed like a slow dissolve in a movie and Cora found herself in the basement den. There were racks of animal horns on one wall and columns of framed gold records on another.

Blank TV screens bulged from a third wall. Behind the long, curved bar were shelves stocked with Gatorade: orange, lime, lemon flavors.

The record-changer on her old portable phonograph with the picture of The King on its vinyl cover clicked. Another forty-five dropped down. Elvis began to sing “Blue Hawaii,” and Cora hulahulaed into the jungle Room with its frowning Tiki gods, the couch with the gargoyle armrests, the mirror with its lacy frame of feathers plucked from the breasts of living pheasants.

She danced. With the sunglasses she had purchased in Needful Things masking her eyes, she danced. She danced at Graceland while her son crept back upstairs and lay down on his bed again and looked at the narrow face of Sandy Koufax and thought about alibis and shotguns.

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn’t feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. This one had been built in and filled that particular bill admirably. Each year the town got a little closer to deciding to build a new one, one with actual windows instead of loopholes and a playground that didn’t look like a penitentiary exercise yard and classrooms that actually stayed warm in the winter.

Sally Ratcliffe’s speech therapy room was an afterthought in the basement, tucked away between the furnace room and the supply closet with its stacks of paper towels, chalk, Ginn and Company textbooks, and barrels of fragrant red sawdust. With her teacher’s desk and six smaller pupil desks in the room there was barely enough space to turn around, but Sally had tried to make the place as cheery as possible, just the same. She knew that most kids who were tapped for speech therapy-the stutterers, the lispers, the dyslexics, the nasal blocks-found the experience a frightening, unhappy one. They were teased by their peers and closely questioned by their parents. There was no need for the environment to be unnecessarily grim on top of all that.

So there were two mobiles hanging from the dusty ceiling pipes, pictures of TV and rock stars on the walls, and a big Garfield poster on the door. The words in the balloon coming out of Garfield’s mouth said, “If a cool cat like me can talk that trash, so can you!”

Her files were woefully behind even though school had been in session for only five weeks. She had meant to spend the whole day updating them, but at quarter past one Sally gathered them all up, stuck them back into the file-drawer they had come from, slammed it shut, and locked it. She told herself she was quitting early because the day was too nice to spend cooped up in this basement room, even with the furnace mercifully silent for a change.

This wasn’t entirely the truth, however. She had very definite plans for this afternoon.

She wanted to go home, she wanted to sit in her chair by the window with the sun flooding into her lap, and she wanted to meditate upon the fabulous splinter of wood she had bought in Needful Things.

She had become more and more sure that the splinter was an authentic miracle, one of the small, divine treasures God had scattered around the earth for His faithful to find. Holding it was like being refreshed by a dipper of well-water on a hot day. Holding it was like being fed when you were hungry. Holding it was…

Well, holding it was ecstasy.

And something had been nagging at her, as well. She had put the splinter in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser, beneath her underwear, and she had been careful to lock her house when she went out, but she had a terrible, nagging feeling that someone might break in and steal the (relic holy relic) splinter. She knew it didn’t make much sense-what robber would want to steal an old gray piece of wood, even if he found it? But if the robber happened to touch it… if those sounds and images filled his head as they filled hers every time she closed the splinter in her small fist… well…

So she’d go home. She’d change into shorts and a halter and spend an hour or so in quiet (exaltation) meditation, feeling the floor beneath her turn into a deck which heaved slowly up and down, listening to the animals moo and low and baa, feeling the light of a different sun, waiting for the magic moment-she was sure it would come if she held the splinter long enough, if she remained very, very quiet and very, very prayerfulwhen the bow of the huge, lumbering boat should come to rest on the mountain top with a low grinding sound. She did not know why God had seen fit to bless her, of all the world’s faithful, with this bright and shining miracle, but since He had, Sally meant to experience it as fully and as completely as she could.

She went out the side door and crossed the playground to the faculty parking lot, a tall, pretty young woman with darkish blonde hair and long legs. There was a good deal of talk about those legs in the barber shop when Sally Ratcliffe went strolling by in her sensible low heels, usually with her purse in one hand and her Bible-stuffed with tracts-in the other.

“Christ, that woman’s got legs right up to her chin,” Bobby Dugas said once.

“Don’t let em worry you,” Charlie Fortin replied. “You ain’t never gonna feel em-wrapped around your ass. She belongs to Jesus and Lester Pratt. In that order.”

The barber shop had exploded into hearty male laughter on the day when Charlie had gotten that one-a genuine Knee-Slapperoff. And outside, Sally Ratcliffe had walked along on her way to Rev. Rose’s Thursday Evening Bible Study for Young Adults, unknowing, uncaring, wrapped securely in her own cheerful innocence and virtue.

No jokes were made about Sally’s legs or Sally’s anything if Lester Pratt happened to be in The Clip joint (and he went there at least once every three weeks to have the bristles of his crewcut sharpened). It was clear to most of those in town who cared about such things that he believed Sally farted perfume and shit petunias, and you didn’t argue about such things with a man who was put together like Lester. He was an amiable enough guy, but on the subjects of God and Sally Ratcliffe he was always dead serious. And a man like Lester could pull off your arms and legs before putting them back on in new and interesting ways, if he wanted to.

He and Sally had had some pretty hot sessions, but they had never gone All the Way. Lester usually returned home after these sessions in a state of total discomposure, his brain bursting with joy and his balls bursting with frustrated jazz, dreaming of the night, not too far away now, when he wouldn’t have to stop. He sometimes wondered if he might not drown her the first time they actually Did It.

Sally was also looking forward to marriage and an end to sexual frustration… although these last few days, Lester’s embraces had seemed a little less important to her. She had debated telling him about the splinter of wood from the Holy Land she had purchased at Needful Things, the splinter with the miracle inside it, and in the end she hadn’t. She would, of course; miracles should be shared.

It was undoubtedly a sin not to share them. But she had been surprised (and a little dismayed) by the feeling of jealous possessiveness which rose up in her each time she thought of showing Lester the splinter and inviting him to hold it.

No! an angry, childish voice had cried out the first time she had considered this. No, it’s mine! It wouldn’t mean as much to him as it does to me! It couldn’t!

The day would come when she would share it with him, just as the day would come when she would share her body with himbut it was not time for either of those things to happen yet.

This hot October day belonged strictly to her.

There were only a few cars in the faculty lot, and Lester’s Mustang was the newest and nicest of them. She’d been having lots of problems with her own car-something in the drive-train kept breaking down-but that was no real problem. When she had called Les this morning and asked if she could have his car yet again (she’d only returned it after a six-day loan at noon the day before), he agreed to drive it over right away. He could jog back, he said, and later he and a bunch of The Guys were going to play touch football.

She guessed he would have insisted that she take the car even if he had needed it, and that seemed perfectly all right to her. She was aware-in a vague, unfocused way that was the result of intuition rather than experience-that Les would jump through hoops of fire if she asked him to, and this established a chain of adoration which she accepted with naive complacency. Les worshipped her; they both worshipped God; everything was as it should be; world without end, amen.

She slipped into the Mustang, and as she turned to put her purse on the console, her eye happened on something white sticking out from beneath the passenger seat. It looked like an envelope.

She bent over and plucked it up, thinking how odd it was to find such a thing in the Mustang; Les usually kept his car as scrupulously neat as his person. There was one word on the front of the envelope, but it gave Sally Ratcliffe a nasty little jolt. The word was Lovey, written in lightly flowing script.

Feminine script.

She turned it over. Nothing written on the back, and the envelope was sealed.

“Lovey?” Sally asked doubtfully, and suddenly realized she was sitting in Lester’s car with all the windows still rolled up, sweating like mad. She started the engine, rolled down the driver’s window, then leaned across the console to roll down the passenger window.

She seemed to catch a faint whiff of perfume as she did it. If so, it wasn’t hers; she didn’t wear perfume, or make-up either. Her religion taught her that such things were the tools of harlots. (And besides, she didn’t need them.) It wasn’t perfume, anyway. just the last of the honeysuckle growing along the playground fence-that’s all you smelled.

“Lovey?” she said again, looking at the envelope.

The envelope said nothing. It just lay there smugly in her hands.

She fluttered her fingers over it, then bent it back and forth.

There was a piece of paper in there, she thought-at least oneand something else, too. The something else felt like it might be a photograph.

She held the envelope up to the windshield, but that was no good; the sun was going the other way now. After a moment’s debate she got out of the car and held the envelope up in front of the sun. She could only make out a light rectangle the letter, she thought-and a darker square shape that was probably an enclosed photo from (Lovey) whoever had sent Les the letter.

Except, of course, it hadn’t been sent-not through the mails, anyway. There was no stamp, no address. Just that one troubling word.

It hadn’t been opened, either, which meant… what? That someone had slipped it into Lester’s Mustang while Sally had been working on her files?

That might be. It might also mean that someone had slipped it into the car last night-even yesterday-and Lester hadn’t seen it.

After all, only a corner had been sticking out; it might have slid forward a little from its place under the seat while she had been driving to school this morning.

“Hi, Miss Ratcliffe!” someone called. Sally jerked the envelope down and hid it in the folds of her skirt. Her heart bumped guiltily.

It was little Billy Marchant, cutting across the playground with his skateboard under his arm. Sally waved to him and then got quickly back into the car. Her face felt hot. She was blushing. It was silly-no, crazy-but she was behaving almost as if Billy had caught her doing something she shouldn’t.

Well, weren’t you? Weren’t you trying to peek at a letter that isn’t yours?

She felt the first twinges of jealousy then. Maybe it was hers; a lot of people in Castle Rock knew she had been driving Lester’s car as much as she had been driving her own these past few weeks.

And even if it wasn’t hers, Lester Pratt was. Hadn’t she just been thinking, with the solid, pleasant complacency which only Christian women who are young and pretty feel so exquisitely, that he would jump through hoops of fire for her?

Lovey.

No one had left that envelope for her, she was sure of that much.

She didn’t have any women friends who called her Sweetheart or Darling or Lovey. It had been left for Lester. AndThe solution suddenly struck her, and she collapsed against the powder-blue bucket seat with a little sigh of relief. Lester taught Phys Ed at Castle Rock High. He only had the boys, of course, but lots of girls-young girls, impressionable girls-saw him every day.

And Les was a good-looking young man.

Some little high school girl with a crush slipped a note into his car.

That’s all it is. She didn’t even dare leave it on the dashboard where he would see i’t right away.

“He wouldn’t mind if I opened it,” Sally said aloud, and tore off the end of the envelope in a neat strip which she put in the ashtray where no cigarette had ever been parked. “We’ll have a good laugh about it tonight.”

She tilted the envelope, and a Kodak print fell out into her hand.

She saw it, and her heart stuttered to a stop for a moment.

Then she gasped. Bright red suffused her cheeks, and her hand covered her mouth, which had pursed itself into a small, shocked O of dismay.

Sally had never been in The Mellow Tiger and so she didn’t know that was the background, but she wasn’t a total innocent; she had watched enough TV and been to enough movies to know a bar when she saw one. The photo showed a man and a woman sitting at a table in what appeared to be one corner (a cozy corner, her mind insisted on calling it) of a large room. There was a pitcher of beer and two Pilsner glasses on the table. Other people were sitting at other tables behind and around them. In the background was a dance-floor.

The man and the woman were kissing.

She was wearing a sparkly sweater top which left her midriff exposed and a skirt of what appeared to be white linen. A very short skirt. One of the man’s hands pressed familiarly against the skin of her waist. The other was actually under her skirt, pushing it up even further. Sally could see the blur of the woman’s panties.

That little chippie, Sally thought with angry dismay.

The man’s back was to the photographer; Sally could make out only his chin and one ear. But she could see that he was very muscular, and that his black hair was mown into a rigorously short crewcut. He was wearing a blue tee-shirt-what the schoolkids called a muscle-shirt-and blue sweatpants with a white stripe on the side.

Lester.

Lester exploring the landscape under that chippies skirt.

No! her mind proclaimed in panicky denial. It can’t be him!

Lester doesn’t go out to bars! He doesn’t even drink! And he’d never kiss another woman, because he loves me! I know he does, because…

“Because he says so.” Her voice, dull and listless, was shocking to her own ears. She wanted to crumple the picture up and throw it out of the car, but she couldn’t do that-someone might find it if she did, and what would that someone think?

She bent over the photograph again, studying it with jealous, intent eyes.

The man’s face blocked most of the woman’s, but Sally could see the line of her brow, the corner of one eye, her left cheek, and the line of her jaw. More important, she could see how the woman’s dark hair was cut-in a shag, with bangs feathered across the forehead.

Judy Libby had dark hair. And Judy Libby had it cut in a shag, with bangs feathered across the forehead.

You’re wrong. No, worse than that-you’re crazy. Les broke up with Judy when she left the church. And then she went away.

To Portland or Boston or someplace like that. This is someone’s twisted, mean idea of a joke. You know Les would neverBut did she know? Did she really?

All of her former complacency now rose up to mock her, and a voice which she had never heard before today suddenly spoke up from some deep chamber of her heart: The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.

It didn’t have to be Judy, though; it didn’t have to be Lester, either. After all, you couldn’t really tell who people were when they were kissing, could you? You couldn’t even tell for sure at the movies if you came in late, not even if they were two famous stars.

You had to wait until they stopped and looked at the camera again.

This was no movie, the new voice assured her. This was real life.

And if it isn’t them, what was that envelope doing in this car?

3

Now her eyes fixed upon the woman’s right hand, which was pressed lightly against (Lester’s) her boyfriend’s neck. She had long, shaped nails, painted with some dark polish. Judy Libby had had nails like that. Sally remembered that she hadn’t been at all surprised when Judy stopped coming to church. A girl with fingernails like that, she remembered thinking, has got a lot more than the Lord of Hosts on her mind.

All right, so it’s probably Judy Libby. That doesn’t mean it’s Lester with her. This could just be her nasty way of getting back at both of us because Lester dropped her when he finally realized she was about as Christian as Judas Iscariot. After all, lots of men have crewcuts, and any man can put on a blue tee-shirt and a pair of pants with white coach-stripes running up the sides.

Then her eye happened upon something else, and her heart suddenly seemed to fill up with lead shot. The man was wearing a wristwatch-the digital kind. She recognized it even though it wasn’t in perfect focus. She ought to have recognized it; hadn’t she given it to Lester herself, for his birthday last month?

It could be a coincidence, her mind insisted feebly. It was only a Seiko, that was all I could afford. Anyone could have a watch like that. But the new voice laughed raucously, despairingly. The new voice wanted to know who she thought she was kidding. And there was more. She couldn’t see the hand under the girl’s skirt (thank God for small favors!), but she could see the arm to which it was attached.

There were two large moles on that arm, just below the elbow. They almost touched, making a shape like a figure-eight.

How often had she run her finger lovingly over those very same moles as she and Lester sat on the porch swing? How often had she kissed them lovingly as he caressed her breasts (armored in a heavy J.

C. Penney bra carefully selected for just such conflicts of love on the back porch) and panted terms of endearment and promises of unflagging loyalty in her ear?

It was Lester, all right. A watch could be put on and taken off, but moles couldn’t be… A snatch of an old disco song occurred to her: “Bad girls… toot-toot… beep-beep… “Chippie, chippie, chippie!” she hissed at the picture in a sudden vicious undertone.

How could he have gone back to her? How?

Maybe, the voice said, because she lets him do what you won’t.

Her breast rose sharply; a hissy little gasp of dismay tore over her teeth and down her throat.

But they’re in a bar! Lester doesn’tThen she realized that was very much a secondary consideration.

If Lester was seeing Judy, if he was lying about that, a lie about whether or not he drank beer wasn’t very important, was it?

Sally put the photograph aside with a shaking hand and pawed out of the envelope the folded note which accompanied it. It was on a single sheet of peach-colored stationery with a deckle edge.

Some light smell, dusty and sweet, came from it when she took it out. Sally held it to her nose and inhaled deeply.

“Chippie!” she cried in a hoarse, agonized undertone. If Judy Libby had appeared in front of her at that moment, Sally would have attacked her with her own nails, sensibly short though they were. She wished Judy were. She wished Lester were, too. It would be awhile before he played any more touch football after she got through with him. Quite awhile.

She unfolded the note. It was short, the words written in the rolling Palmer Method hand of a schoolgirl.

Darling Les, Felicia took this when we were at the Tiger the other night. She said she ought to use it to blackmail us! But she was only teasing. She gave it to me, and I am giving it to you as a souvenier of our BIG NIGHT. It was TERRIBLY NAUGHTY Of yoU to pUt your hand under my skirt like that “ight out in public,” but ’ me SO r it got HOT. Besides, you are SO STRONG. The more I looked at it the more “hot” it started to make me. If you look close, you can see my underwear! It’s a good thing Felicia wasn’t around later, when I wasn’t wearing any!!! I will see you soon. In the meantime, keep this picture “in remembrance of me.” I will be thinking of you and your BIG THING. I better stop now before I get any hotter or I’ll have to do something naughty. And please stop worrying about YOU KNOW WHO. She is two busy going steady with Jesus to worry about us.

Your Judy Sally sat behind the wheel of Lester’s Mustang for almost half an hour, reading this note again and again, her mind and her emotions in a stew of anger, jealousy, and hurt. There was also an undertone of sexual excitement in her thoughts and feelings-but this was something she would never have admitted to anyone, least of all herself.

The stupid slut doesn’t even know how to spell “too,” she thought.

Her eyes kept finding new phrases to fix upon. Most of them were the ones which had been capitalized.

But the phrase she kept returning to, the one which fed her rage most successfully, was that blasphemous perversion of the Communion ritual:… keep this picture “in remembrance of me.”

Obscene images rose in Sally’s mind, unbidden. Lester’s mouth closing on one of Judy Libby’s nipples while she crooned: “Take, drink ye all of this, in remembrance of me.” Lester on his knees between Judy Libby’s spread legs while she told him to take, eat this in remembrance of me.

She crumpled the peach-colored sheet of paper into a ball and threw it onto the floor of the car. She sat bolt upright behind the wheel, breathing hard, her hair fuzzed out in sweaty tangles (she had been running her free hand distractedly through it as she studied the note). Then she bent, picked it up, smoothed it out, and stuffed both it and the photograph back into the envelope. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to try three times to get it in, and when she finally did, she tore the envelope halfway down the side.

“Chippie!” she cried again, and burst into tears. The tears were hot; they burned like acid. “Bitch! And you! You! Lying bastard!”

She jammed the key into the ignition. The Mustang awoke with a roar that sounded as angry as she felt. She dropped the gearshift into drive and tore out of the faculty parking lot in a cloud of blue smoke and a wailing shriek of burned rubber.

Billy Merchant, who was practicing nosies on his skateboard across the playground, looked up in surprise.

4

She was in her bedroom fifteen minutes later, digging through her underwear, looking for the splinter and not finding it. Her anger at Judy and her lying bastard of a boyfriend had been eclipsed by an overmastering terror-what if it was gone? What if it had been stolen after all?

Sally had brought the torn envelope in with her, and became aware that it was still clutched in her left hand. It was impeding her search. She threw it aside and tore her sensible cotton underwear out of her drawer in big double handfuls, throwing it everywhere. just as she felt she must scream with a combination of panic, rage, and frustration, she saw the splinter. She had pulled the drawer open so hard that it had slid all the way into the left rear corner of the drawer.

She snatched it up, and at once felt peace and serenity flood through her. She grabbed the envelope with her other hand and then held both hands in front of her, good and evil, sacred and profane, alpha and omega. Then she put the torn envelope in the drawer and tossed her underwear on top of it in helter-skelter piles.

She sat down, crossed her legs, and bowed her head over the splinter. She shut her eyes, expecting to feel the floor begin to sway gently beneath her, expecting the peace which came to her when she heard the voices of the animals, the poor dumb animals, saved in a time of wickedness by the grace of God.

Instead, she heard the voice of the man who had sold her the splinter. You really ought to take care of this, you know, Mr. Gaunt said from deep within the relic. You really ought to take care of this… this nasty business.

“Yes,” Sally Ratcliffe said. “Yes, I know.”

She sat there all afternoon in her hot maiden’s bedroom, thinking and dreaming in the dark circle which the splinter spread around her, a darkness which was like the hood of a cobra.

5

“Lookit my king, all dressed in green… iko-iko one day… he’s not a man, he’s a lovin’ machine…”

While Sally Ratcliffe was meditating in her new darkness, Polly Chalmers was sitting in a bar of brilliant sunlight by a window she had opened to let in a little of the unseasonably warm October afternoon.

She was running her Singer Dress-0-Matic and singing “lko Iko” in her clear, pleasant alto voice.

Rosalie Drake came over and said, “I know someone who’s feeling better today. A lot better, by the sound.”

Polly looked up and offered Rosalie a smile which was strangely complex. “I do and don’t,” she said.

“What you mean is that you do and can’t help it.”

Polly considered this for a few moments and then nodded her head.

It wasn’t exactly right, but it would do. The two women who had died together yesterday were together again today, at the Samuels Funeral Home. They would be buried out of different churches tomorrow morning, but by tomorrow afternoon Nettle and Wilma would be neighbors again… in Homeland Cemetery, this time.

Polly counted herself partially responsible for their deaths-after all, Nettle would never have come back to Castle Rock if not for her.

She had written the necessary letters, attended the necessary hearings, had even found Netitia Cobb a place to live. And why?

The hell of it was, Polly couldn’t really remember now, except it had seemed an act of Christian charity and the last responsibility of an old family friendship.

She would not duck this culpability, nor let anyone try to talk her out of it (Alan had wisely not even tried), but she was not sure she would have changed what she had done. The core of Nettle’s madness had been beyond Polly’s power to control or alter, apparently, but she had nevertheless spent three happy, productive years in Castle Rock.

Perhaps three such years were better than the long gray time she would have spent in the institution, before old age or simple boredom cashed her in. And if Polly had, by her actions, signed her name to

Wilma jerzyck’s death-warrant, hadn’t Wilma written the particulars of that document herself? After all, it had been Wilma, not Polly, who had stabbed Nettle Cobb’s cheery and inoffensive little dog to death with a corkscrew.

There was another part of her, a simpler part, which simply grieved for the passing of her friend, and puzzled over the fact that Nettle could have done such a thing when it really had seemed to Polly that she was getting better.

She had spent a good part of the morning making funeral arrangements and calling Nettle’s few relatives (all of them had indicated that they wouldn’t be at the funeral, which was only what Polly had expected), and this job, the clerical processes of death, had helped to focus her own grief… as the rituals of burying the dead are undoubtedly supposed to do.

There were some things, however, which would not yet leave her mind.

The lasagna, for instance-it was still sitting in the refrigerator with the foil over the top to keep it from drying out. She supposed she and Alan would eat it for dinner tonight-if he could come over, that was. She wouldn’t eat it by herself. She couldn’t stand that.

She kept remembering how quickly Nettle had seen she was in pain, how exactly she had gauged that pain, and how she had brought her the thermal gloves, insisting that this time they really might help. And, of course, the last thing Nettle had said to her: “I love you, Polly.”

“Earth to Polly, Earth to Polly, come in, Polly, do you read?”

Rosalie chanted. She and Polly had remembered Nettle together that morning, trading these and other reminiscences, and had cried together in the back room, holding each other amid the bolts of cloth. Now Rosalie also seemed happy-perhaps just because she had heard Polly singing.

Or because she wasn’t entirely real to either of us, Polly mused.

There was a shadow over her-not one that was completely black, mind you; it was just thick enough to make her hard to see. That’s what makes our grief so fragile.

“I hear you,” Polly said. “I do feel better, I can’t help it, and I’m very grateful for it. Does that about cover the waterfront?”

“Just about,” Rosalie agreed. “I don’t know what surprised me more when I came back in-hearing you singing, or hearing you running a sewing machine again. Hold up your hands.”

Polly did. They would never be mistaken for the hands of a beauty queen, with their crooked fingers and the Heberden’s nodes, which grotesquely enlarged the knuckles, but Rosalie could see that the swelling had gone down dramatically since last Friday, when the constant pain had caused Polly to leave early.

“Wow!” Rosalie said. “Do they hurt at all?”

“Sure-but they’re still better than they’ve been in a month.

Look.”

She slowly rolled her fingers into loose fists. Then she opened them again, using the same care. “It’s been at least a month since I’ve been able to do that.” The truth, Polly knew, was a little more extreme; she hadn’t been able to make fists without suffering serious pain since April or May.

“Wow!yl “So I feel better,” Polly said. “Now if Nettle were here to share it, that would make things just about perfect.”

The door at the front of the shop opened.

“Will you see who that is?” Polly asked. “I want to finish sewing this sleeve.”

“You bet.” Rosalie started off, then stopped for a moment and looked back. “Nettle wouldn’t mind you feeling good, you know.”

Polly nodded. “I do know,” she said gravely.

Rosalie went out front to wait on the customer. When she was gone, Polly’s left hand went to her chest and touched the small bulge, not much bigger than an acorn, that rested under her pink sweater and between her breasts.

Azka-what a wonderful word, she thought, and began to run the sewing machine again, turning the fabric of the dress-her first original since last summer-back and forth under the jittery silver blur of the needle.

She wondered idly how much Mr. Gaunt would want for the amulet.

Whatever he wants, she told herself, it won’t be enough. I won’t-I can’t-think that way when it comes time to dicker, but it’s the simple truth. Whatever he wants for it will be a bargain.