Needful Things

1

The Castle Rock selectmen (and selectwoman) shared a single fulltime secretary, a young woman with the exotic name of Ariadne St.

Claire. She was a happy young woman, not overburdened with intelligence but tireless and pleasing to look at. She had large breasts which rose in soft, steep hills beneath an apparently endless supply of angora sweaters, and lovely skin. She also had very bad eyes.

They swam, brown and enlarged, behind the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. Buster liked her. He considered her too dumb to be one of Them.

Ariadne poked her head into his office at quarter to four. “Deke Bradford came by, Mr. Keeton. He needs a signature on a fundrelease form. Can you do it?”

“Well, let’s see what it is,” Buster said, slipping that day’s sports section of the Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, deftly into his desk drawer.

He felt better today; purposeful and alert. Those wretched pink slips had been burned in the kitchen stove, Myrtle had stopped sidling away like a singed cat when he approached (he no longer cared much for Myrtle, but it was still annoying to live with a woman who thought you were the Boston Strangler), and he expected to clear another large bundle of cash at the Raceway that night. Because of the holiday, the crowds (not to mention the payoffs) would be bigger.

He had, in fact, started to think in terms of quinellas and trifectas.

As for Deputy Dickface and Sheriff Shithead and all the rest of their merry crew… well, he and Mr. Gaunt knew about Them, and Buster believed the two of them were going to make one hell of a team.

For all these reasons he was able to welcome Ariadne into his office with equanimity-he was even able to take some of his old pleasure in observing the gentle way her bosom swayed within its no doubt formidable harness.

She put a fund-release form on his desk. Buster picked it up and leaned back in his swivel chair to look it over. The amount requested was noted in a box at the top-nine hundred and forty dollars. The payee was to be Case Construction and Supply in Lewiston. In the space reserved for Goods and/or Services to Be Supplied, Deke had printed 16 CASES OF DYNAMITE. Below, in the CommentslExplanations section, he had written: We’ve finally come up against that granite ridge at the gravel pi’t out on Town Road #5, the one the state geologist warned us about back i’n ’87 (see my report for details). Anyway, there is plenty more gravel beyond it, but we’ll have to blow out the rock to get at i’t.

This should be done before it gets cold and the winter snowfall starts.

If we have to buy a winter’s worth of gravel over. n Norway, the taxpayers are going to howl blue murder. Two or three bangs should take care of it, and Case has a hig supply of Taggart Hi’-Impact on hand-I checked. We can have it by noon tomorrow, if we want, and start blasting on Wednesday. I have the spots marked if anyone from the Selectmen’s Office wants to come out and take a look.

Below this, Deke had scrawled his signature.

Buster read Deke’s note twice, tapping his front teeth thoughtfully as Ariadne stood waiting. At last he rocked forward in his chair, made a change, added a sentence, initialed both the change and the addition, then signed his own name below Deke’s with a flourish. When he handed the pink sheet of paper back to Ariadne, he was smiling.

“There!” he said. “And everyone thinks I’m such a skinflint!”

Ariadne looked at the form. Buster had changed the amount from nine hundred and forty dollars to fourteen hundred dollars.

Below Deke’s explanation of what he wanted the dynamite for, Buster had added this: Better get at least twenty cases while the supply I. s good.

“Will you want to go out and look at the gravel pit, Mr. Keeton?”

“Nope, nope, won’t be necessary.” Buster leaned back in his chair again and locked his hands together behind his neck. “But ask Deke to give me a call when the stuff arrives. That’s a lot of bang. We wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, would we?”

“No indeed,” Ariadne said, and went out. She was glad to go.

There was something in Mr. Keeton’s smile which she found… well, a little creepy.

Buster, meanwhile, had swivelled his chair around so he could look out at Main Street, which was a good deal busier than it had been when he had looked out over the town with such despair on Saturday morning.

A lot had happened since then, and he suspected that a lot more would happen in the next couple of days. Why, with twenty cases of Taggart HI-Impact Dynamite stored in the town’s Public Works shed-a shed to which he, of course, had a keyalmost anything could happen.

Anything at all.

2

Ace Merrill crossed the Tobin Bridge and entered Boston at four o’clock that afternoon, but it was well past five before he finally reached what he hoped was his destination. It was in a strange, mostly deserted slum section of Cambridge, near the center of a meandering snarl of streets. Half of them seemed to be posted oneway; the other half were dead ends. The ruined buildings of this decayed area were throwing long shadows over the streets when Ace stopped in front of a stark one-story cinderblock building on Whipple Street. It stood in the center of a weedy vacant lot.

There was a chainlink fence around the property, but it presented no problem; the gate had been stolen. Only the hinges remained. Ace could see what were probably bolt-cutter scars on them. He eased the Challenger through the gap where the gate had been and drove slowly toward the cinderblock building.

Its walls were blank and windowless. The rutted track he was on led to a closed garage door in the side of the building which faced the River Charles. There were no windows in the garage door, either. The Challenger rocked on its springs and bounced unhappily through holes in what might once have been an asphalt surface. He passed an abandoned baby carriage sitting in a strew of broken glass. A decayed doll with half a face reclined inside, staring at him with one moldy blue eye as he passed. He parked in front of the closed garage door. What the hell was he supposed to do now? The cinderblock building had the look of a place which had been deserted since 1945 or so.

Ace got out of the car. He took a scrap of paper from his breast pocket. Written on it was the address of the place where Gaunt’s car was supposed to be stored. He looked doubtfully at it again.

The last few numbers he had passed suggested that this was probably 85 Whipple Street, but who the fuck could tell for sure?

Places like this never had street numbers, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around he could ask. In fact, this whole section of town had a deserted, creepy feel Ace didn’t much like. Vacant lots. Stripped cars which had been looted of every useful part and every centimeter of copper wire. Empty tenements waiting for the politicians to get their kickbacks straight before they fell under the wrecking ball. Twisty side-streets that dead-ended in dirty courtyards and trashy cul-de-sacs. It had taken him an hour to find Whipple Street, and now that he had, he almost wished it had stayed lost. This was the part of town where the cops sometimes found the bodies of infants stuffed into rusty garbage cans and discarded refrigerators.

He walked over to the garage door and looked for a push-bell.

There was none. He leaned the side of his head against the rusty metal and listened for the sounds of someone inside. It could be a chop-shop, he supposed; a dude with a supply of high-tension coke like the stuff Gaunt had laid on him might very well know the sort of people who sold Porsches and Lamborghinis for cash after the sun went down.

He heard nothing but silence.

Probably not even the right place, he thought, but he had been up and down the goddam street and it was the only place on it big enough-and strong enough-to store a classic car in. Unless he had fucked up royally and come to the wrong part of town. The idea made him nervous. I want you back by midnight, Mr. Gaunt had said. If you’re not back by midnight, I will be unhappy. When I’m unhappy, I sometimes lose my temper.

Mellow out, Ace told himself uneasily. He’s just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. Probably a fag.

But he couldn’t mellow out, and he didn’t really think Mr. Leland Gaunt was just some old dude with a bad set of false teeth. He also thought he didn’t want to find out for sure one way or the other.

But the current thing was this: it was going to be dark before long, and Ace didn’t want to be in this part of town after dark.

There was something wrong with it. Something that went beyond the spooky tenements with their blank, staring windows and the cars standing on naked wheelrims in the gutter. He hadn’t seen a single person on the sidewalk or sitting on a stoop or looking out a window since he started getting close to Whipple Street… but he had had the sensation that he was being watched, just the same.

Still had it, in fact: a busy crawling in the short hairs on the back of his neck.

It was almost as though he were not in Boston at all anymore.

This place was more like the motherfucking Twilight Zone.

If you’re not back by midnight, I will be unhappy.

Ace made a fist and hammered on the rusty, featureless face of the garage door. “Hey! Anybody in there want to look at some Tupperware?”

No answer.

There was a handle at the bottom of the door. He tried it. No joy. The door wouldn’t even rattle in its frame, let alone roll up on its tracks.

Ace hissed air out between his teeth and looked around nervously.

His Challenger was standing nearby, and he had never in his life wanted so much to just get in and go. But he didn’t dare.

He walked around the building and there was nothing. Nothing at all. just expanses of cinderblock, painted an unpleasant snotgreen.

An odd piece of graffiti had been spray-painted on the back of the garage, and Ace looked at it for some moments, not understanding why it made his skin crawl.

it read in faded red letters.

He arrived back at the garage door and thought, Now what?

Because he could think of nothing else, he got back into the Challenger and just sat there, looking at the garage door. At last, he laid both hands on the horn and honked a long, frustrated blast.

At once the garage door began to roll silently up on its tracks.

Ace sat watching it, gape-mouthed, and his first urge was to simply start the Challenger up and drive away as fast as he could and as far as he could. Mexico City might do for a start. Then he thought of Mr. Gaunt again and got slowly out of his car. He walked over to the garage as the door came to rest below the ceiling inside.

The interior was brightly lit by half a dozen two-hundred-watt bulbs hanging at the ends of thick electrical cords. Each bulb had been shaded with a piece of tin shaped into a cone, so that the lights cast circular pools of brightness on the floor. On the far side of the cement floor was a car covered with a dropcloth. There was a table littered with tools standing against one wall. Three crates were stacked against another wall. On top of them was an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The garage was otherwise empty.

“Who opened the door?” Ace asked in a dry little voice. “Who opened the fucking door?”

But to this there was no answer.

3

He drove the Challenger inside and parked it against the rear wall-there was plenty of room. Then he walked back to the doorway.

There was a control box mounted on the wall next to it. Ace pushed the DOWN button. The waste ground on which this enigmatic blockhouse of a building stood was filling up with shadows, and they made him nervous. He kept thinking he saw things moving out there.

The door rolled down without a single squeak or rattle. While he waited for it to close all the way, Ace looked around for the sonic sensor which had responded to the sound of his horn. He couldn’t see it. It had to be here someplace, though-garage doors did not open all by themselves.

Although, he thought, if shit like that happens anywhere in this town, Whipple Street’s probably the place.

Ace walked over to the stack of crates with the tape recorder on top. His feet made a hollow gritting sound on the cement. YogSothoth rules, he thought randomly, and then shivered. He didn’t know who the fuck Yog-Sothoth was, probably some Rastafarian reggae singer with ninety pounds of dreadlocks growing out of his dirty scalp, but Ace still didn’t like the sound that name made in his head. Thinking about that name in this place seemed like a bad idea. It seemed like a dangerous idea.

A scrap of paper had been taped to one of the recorder’s reels.

Two words were written on it in large capital letters:

PLAY ME.

Ace pulled off the note and pushed the PLAY button. The reels began to turn, and when he heard that voice, he jumped a little.

Still, whose voice had he expected? Richard Nixon’s?

“Hello, Ace,” Mr. Gaunt’s recorded voice said. “Welcome to Boston. Please remove the tarp from my car and load the crates.

They contain rather special merchandise which I expect to need quite soon now. I’m afraid you’ll have to put at least one crate in the back seat; the Tucker’s trunk leaves something to be desired.

Your own car will be quite safe here, and your ride back will be uneventful. And please remember this-the sooner you get back, the sooner you can begin investigating the locations on your map.

Have a pleasant trip.”

The message was followed by the empty hiss of tape and the low whine of the capstan drive.

Ace left the reels turning for almost a minute, nevertheless.

This whole situation was weird… and getting weirder all the time.

Mr. Gaunt had been here during the afternoon-had to have been, because he had mentioned the map, and Ace hadn’t laid eyes on either the map or Mr. Leland Gaunt until this morning. The old buzzard must have taken a plane down while he, Ace, was driving.

But why? What the fuck did it all mean?

He hasn’t been here, he thought. I don’t care if it’s impossible or not-he hasn’t been here. Look at that goddam tape recorder, for instance. Nobody uses tape recorders like that anymore. And look at the dust on the reels. The note was dusty, too. This set-up has been waiting for you a long time. Maybe it’s been sitting here and catching dust ever since Pangborn sent you to Shawshank.

Oh, but that was crazy.

That was just bullshit.

Nevertheless, there was a deep core-part of him that believed it was true. Mr. Gaunt hadn’t been anywhere near Boston this afternoon.

Mr. Gaunt had spent the afternoon in Castle RockAce knew it-standing by his window, watching the passersby, perhaps even removing the

sign every now and then and putting up

in its place. If he saw the right person approaching, that was-the sort of person with whom a fellow like Mr. Gaunt might want to do a spot of business. just what was his business?

Ace wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But he wanted to know what was in those crates. If he was going to transport them from here all the way back to Castle Rock, he had a goddam right to know.

He pushed the STOP button on the tape recorder and lifted it aside. He took a hammer from the tools on top of the work-table and the crowbar which leaned against the wall next to it. He returned to the crates and slid the crowbar’s flat end under the wooden lid of the one on top. He levered it up. The nails let go with a thin shriek.

The contents of the crate were covered with a heavy oilcloth square.

He lifted it aside and simply gaped at what he saw beneath.

Blasting caps.

Dozens of blasting caps.

Maybe hundreds of blasting caps, each resting in its own cozy little nest of excelsior.

Jesus Christ, what’s he planning to do? Start World War III?

Heart thumping heavily in his chest, Ace hammered the nails back down and lifted the crate of blasting caps aside. He opened the second crate, expecting to see neat rows of fat red sticks that looked like road-flares.

But it wasn’t dynamite. It was guns.

There were maybe two dozen in all-high-powered automatic pistols.

The smell of the deep grease in which they had been packed drifted up to him. He didn’t know what kind they wer@erman, maybe-but he knew what they meant: twenty-to-life if he was caught with them in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth took an extremely dim view of guns, especially automatic weapons.

This case he set aside without putting the lid back on. He opened the third crate. It was full of ammo clips for the pistols.

Ace stepped back, rubbing his mouth nervously with the palm of his left hand.

Blasting caps.

Automatic handguns.

Ammunition.

This was merchandise?

“Not me,” Ace said in a low voice, shaking his head. “Not this kid. Uh-uh, no way.”

Mexico City was looking better and better. Maybe even RioAce didn’t know if Gaunt was building a better mousetrap or a better electric chair, but he did know he wanted no part of it, whatever it was. He was leaving, and he was leaving right now.

His eyes fixed on the crate of automatic pistols.

And I’m taking one of those babies with me, he thought. A little something for my trouble. Call it a souvenir.

He started toward the crate, and at that instant the reels of the tape recorder began to turn again, although none of the buttons had been depressed.

“Don’t even think about it, Ace,” the voice of Mr. Gaunt advised coldly, and Ace screamed. “You don’t want to fuck with me. What I do to you if you even try will make what the Corson Brothers were planning look like a day in the country. You’re my boy now.

Stick with me and we’ll have fun. Stick with me and you’ll get back at everyone in Castle Rock who ever did the nasty to you… and you’ll leave a rich man. Go against me and you’ll never stop screaming.”

The tape recorder stopped.

Ace’s bulging eyes followed its power cord to the plug. It lay on the floor, covered with a fine spill of dust.

Besides, there wasn’t an outlet in sight.

4

Ace suddenly began to feel a little calmer, and this was not quite so odd as it might have seemed. There were two reasons for the steadying of his emotional barometer.

The first was that Ace was a kind of throwback. He would have been perfectly at home living in a cave and dragging his woman around by the hair when he wasn’t busy throwing rocks at his enemies. He was the sort of man whose response is only completely predictable when he is confronted with superior strength and authority. Confrontations of this kind didn’t happen often, but when they did, he bowed to the superior force almost at once. Although he did not know it, it was this characteristic which had kept him from simply running away from the Flying Corson Brothers in the first place. In men like Ace Merrill, the only urge stronger than the urge to dominate is the deep need to roll over and humbly expose the undefended neck when the real leader of the pack puts in an appearance.

The second reason was even simpler: he chose to believe he was dreaming. There was some part of him which knew this wasn’t true, but the idea was still easier to believe than the evidence of his senses; he didn’t even want to consider a world which might admit the presence of a Mr. Gaunt. It would be easier-safer-to just close down his thinking processes for awhile and march along to the conclusion of this business. If he did that, he might eventually wake up to the world he had always known. God knew that world had its dangers, but at least he understood it.

He hammered the tops back onto the crate of pistols and the crate of ammo. Then he went over to the stored automobile and grasped the canvas tarpaulin, which was also covered with a mantle of dust. He pulled it off… and for a moment he forgot everything else in wonder and delight.

It was a Tucker, all right, and it was beautiful.

The paint was canary yellow. The streamlined body gleamed with chrome along the sides and beneath the notched front bumper.

A third headlight stared from the center of the hood, below a silver ornament that looked like the engine of a futuristic express train.

Ace walked slowly around it, trying to eat it up with his eyes.

There was a pair of chromed grilles on either side of the back deck; he had no idea what they were for. The fat Goodyear whitewalls were so clean they almost glowed under the hanging lights.

Written in flowing chrome script across the back deck were the words “Tucker Talisman.” Ace had never heard of such a model.

He had thought the Torpedo was the only car Preston Tucker had ever turned out.

You have another problem, old buddy-there are no license plates on this thing. Are you going to try getting all the way back to Maine in a car that sticks out like a sore thumb, a car with no plates, a car loaded with guns and explosive devices?

Yes. He was. It was a bad idea, of course, a really bad idea… but the alternative-which would involve trying to fuck over Mr.

Leland Gaunt-seemed so much worse. Besides, this was a dream.

He shook the keys out of the envelope, went around to the trunk, and hunted in vain for a keyhole. After a few moments he remembered the movie with Jeff Bridges and understood. Like the German VW Beetle and the Chevy Corvair, the Tucker’s engine was back here. The trunk was up front.

Sure enough, he found the keyhole directly under that weird third headlight. He opened the trunk. It was indeed very cozy, and empty except for a single object. It was a small bottle of white dust with a spoon attached to the cap by a chain. A small piece of paper had been taped to the chain. Ace pulled it free and read the message which had been written there in teeny capital letters:

Ace followed orders.

5

Feeling much better with a little of Mr. Gaunt’s incomparable blow lighting up his brain like the front of Henry Beaufort’s Rock-Ola, Ace loaded the guns and the clips of ammo into the trunk. He put the crate of blasting caps into the back seat, pausing for just a moment to inhale deeply. The sedan had that incomparable newcar smell, nothing like it in the world (except maybe for pussy), and when he got behind the wheel, he saw that it was brand new: the odometer of Mr. Gaunt’s Tucker Talisman was set at 00000.0.

Ace pushed the ignition key into the slot and turned it.

The Talisman started up with a low, throaty, delightful rumble.

How many horses under the hood? He didn’t know, but it felt like a whole herd of them. There had been lots of automotive books in prison, and Ace had read most of them. The Tucker Torpedo had been a flathead six, about three hundred and fifty cubic inches, a lot like the cars Mr. Ford had built between 1948 and 1952. It had had something like a hundred and fifty horses under the hood.

This one felt bigger. A lot bigger.

Ace felt an urge to get out, go around back, and see if he could worry the hood open… but it was like thinking too much about that crazy name-Yog-whatever. Somehow it seemed like a bad idea. What seemed like a good idea was to get this thing back to Castle Rock just as fast as he could.

He started to get out of the car to use the door control, then honked the horn instead, just to see if anything would happen.

Something did. The door trundled silently up on its rails.

There’s a sound sensor around someplace for sure, he told himself, but he no longer believed it. He no longer even cared. He shifted into first and the Talisman throbbed out of the garage. He honked again as he started down the rutty path to the hole in the fence, and in the rearview mirror he saw the garage lights go out and the door start to descend. He also caught a glimpse of his Challenger, standing with its nose to the wall and the crumpled tarp on the floor beside it.

He had an odd feeling that he was never going to see it again. Ace found he didn’t care about that, either.

6

The Talisman not only ran like a dream, it seemed to know its own way back to Storrow Drive and the turnpike north. Every now and then the turnblinkers went on by themselves. When this happened, Ace simply made the next turn. In no time at all the creepy little Cambridge slum where he had found the Tucker was behind him, and the shape of the Tobin Bridge, more familiarly known as the Mystic River Bridge, was looming in front of him,-a black gantry against the darkening sky.

Ace pulled the light-switch, and a sharply defined fan of radiance at once sprang out before him. When he turned the wheel, the fan of light turned with it. That center headlight was a hell of a rig. No wonder they drove the poor bastard who thought this car up out of business, Ace thought.

He was about thirty miles north of Boston when he noticed the needle of the fuel gauge was sitting on the peg beyond E. He pulled off at the nearest exit and cruised Mr. Gaunt’s ride to a stop at the pumps of a Mobile station which stood at the ramp’s foot. The pump jockey pushed his cap back on his head with one greasy thumb and walked around the car admiringly. “Nice car!” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

Without thinking, Ace said, “The Plains of Leng. Yog-Sothoth Vintage Motors.”

“Huh?”

“Just fill it up, son-this isn’t Twenty Questions.”

“Oh!” the pump jockeysaid, taking a second look at Ace and becoming obsequious at once. “Sure! You bet!”

And he tried, but the pump clicked off after running just fourteen cents into the tank. The pump jockey tried to squeeze more in by running the pump manually, but the gas only slopped out, running down the Talisman’s gleaming yellow flank and dripping onto the tarmac.

“I guess it doesn’t need gas,” the jockeysaid timidly.

“Guess not.”

“Maybe your fuel gauge is bust-”

“Wipe that gas off the side of my car. You want the paint to blister? What’s the matter with you?”

The kid sprang to do it, and Ace went into the bathroom to help his nose a little. When he came out, the pump jockey was standing at a respectful distance from the Talisman, twisting his rag nervously in both hands.

He’s scared, Ace thought. Scared of what? Me?

No; the kid in the Mobile coverall barely glanced in Ace’s direction. It was the Tucker that kept drawing his gaze.

He tried to touch it, Ace thought.

The revelation-and that was what it was, exactly what it wasbrought a grim little smile to the corners of his mouth.

He tried to touch it and something happened. What it was don’t really matter. It taught him that he can look but he better not touch, and that’s all that does matter.

“Won’t be no charge,” the pump ’ockeysaid.

“You got that right.” Ace slid behind the wheel and got rolling in a hurry. He had a brand-new idea about the Talisman. In a way it was a scary idea, but in another way it was a really great idea. He thought that maybe the gas gauge always read empty… and that the tank was always full.

7

The toll-gates for passenger cars in New Hampshire are the automated kind; you throw a buck’s worth of change (No Pennies Please) into the basket, the red light turns green, and you go. Except when Ace rolled the Tucker Talisman up to the basket jutting out from the post, the light turned green on its own and the little sign shone out:

“Betcha fur,” Ace muttered, and drove on toward Maine.

By the time he left Portland behind, he had the Talisman cruising along at just over eighty miles an hour, and there was plenty left under the hood. just past the Falmouth exit, he topped a rise and saw a State Police cruiser lurking beside the highway. The distinctive torpedo-shape of a radar gun jutted from the driver’s window.

Uh-oh, Ace thought. He got me. Dead-bang. Jesus Christ, why was I speeding anyway, with all the shit I’m carrying?

But he knew why, and it wasn’t the coke he had snorted. Maybe on another occasion, but not this time. It was the Talisman. It wanted to go fast. He would look at the speedometer, ease his foot off the go-pedal a little… and five minutes later he would realize he had it three quarters of the way to the floor again.

He waited for the cruiser to come alive in a blaze of pulsing blue lights and rip out after him, but it didn’t happen. Ace blipped past at eighty, and the State Bear never made a move.

Hell, he must have been cooping.

But Ace knew better. When you saw a radar gun poking out of the window, you knew the guy inside was wide awake and hot to trot. No, what had happened was this: the State cop hadn’t been able to see the Talisman. It sounded crazy, but it felt exactly right.

The big yellow car with its three headlights screaming out of the front was invisible to both high-tech hardware and the cops that used it.

Grinning, Ace walked Mr. Gaunt’s Tucker Talisman up to a hundred and ten. He arrived back in The Rock at quarter past eight, with almost four hours to spare.

8

Mr. Gaunt emerged from his shop and stood beneath the canopy to watch Ace baby the Talisman into one of the three slant parking spaces in front of Needful Things.

“You made good time, Ace.”

“Yeah. This is some car.”

“Bet your fur,” Mr. Gaunt said. He ran a hand along the Tucker’s smoothly sloping front deck. “One of a kind. You have brought my merchandise, I take it?”

“Yeah. Mr. Gaunt, I got some idea of just how special this car of yours is on the way back, but I think you still might consider getting some license plates for it, and maybe an inspection stick-”

“They are not necessary,” Mr. Gaunt said Indifferently. “Park it in the alley behind the shop, Ace, if you please. I’ll take care of it later.”

“How? Where?” Ace found himself suddenly reluctant to turn the car over to Mr. Gaunt. It was not just that he’d left his own car in Boston and needed wheels for his night’s work; the Talisman made every other car he had ever driven, including the Challenger, seem like street-trash.

“That,” said Mr. Gaunt, “is my business.” He looked at Ace imperturbably. “You’ll find that things go more smoothly for you, Ace, if you look at working for me the way you would look at serving in the Army. There are three ways of doing things for you now-the right way, the wrong way, and Mr. Gaunt’s way. If you always opt for the third choice, trouble will never find you. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“That’s fine. Now drive around to the back door.”

Ace piloted the yellow car around the corner and drove slowly up the narrow alley which ran behind the business buildings on the west side of Main Street. The rear door of Needful Things was open. Mr.

Gaunt stood in a slanted oblong of yellow light, waiting.

He made no effort to help as Ace carried the crates into the shop’s back room, puffing with the effort. He did not know it, but a good many customers would have been surprised if they had seen that room. They had heard Mr. Gaunt back there behind the hanging velvet drape which divided the shop from the storage area, shifting goods, moving boxes around… but there was nothing at all in the room until Ace stacked the crates in one corner at Mr. Gaunt’s direction.

Yes-there was one thing. On the far side of the room, a brown Norway rat was lying beneath the sprung arm of a large Victory rat-trap. Its neck was broken, its front teeth exposed in a dead snarl.

“Good job,” Mr. Gaunt said, rubbing his long-fingered hands together and smiling. “This has been a good evening’s work, all told.

You have performed to the top of my expectations, Ace-the very top.”

“Thanks, sir.” Ace was astounded. He had never in his life called any man sir until this moment.

“Here’s a little something for your trouble.” Mr. Gaunt handed Ace a brown envelope. Ace pressed at it with the tips of his fingers and felt the loose grit of powder inside. “I believe you will want to do some investigating tonight, won’t you? This might give you a little extra go-power, as the old Esso ads used to say.”

Ace started. “Oh, shit! Shit! I left that book-the book with the map in it-in my car! It’s back in Boston! God damn it!” He made a fist and slammed it against his thigh.

Mr. Gaunt was smiling. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s in the Tucker.”

“No, I-”

“Why not check for yourself?”

So Ace did, and of course the book was there, sitting on the dashboard with its spine pressing against the Tucker’s patented popout windshield. Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. He took it and thumbed it. The map was still inside. He looked at Mr.

Gaunt with dumb gratitude.

“I won’t require your services again until tomorrow evening, around this same time,” Mr. Gaunt said. “I suggest you spend the daylight hours at your place in Mechanic Falls. That should suit you well enough; I believe you’ll want to sleep late. You still have a busy night ahead of you, if I am not mistaken.”

Ace thought of the little crosses on the map and nodded.

“And,” Mr. Gaunt added, “it might be prudent for you to avoid the notice of Sheriff Pangborn for the next day or two. After that, I don’t think it will matter.” His lips pulled back; his teeth sprang forward in large, predatory clumps. “By the end of the week, I think a lot of things which heretofore mattered a great deal to the citizens of this town are going to cease to matter at all. Don’t you think so, Ace?”

“If you say so,” Ace replied. He was falling into that strange, dazed state again, and he didn’t mind at all. “I don’t know how I’m going to get around, though.”

“All taken care of,” Mr. Gaunt said. “You’ll find a car parked out front with the keys in the ignition. A company car, so to speak.

I’m afraid it’s only a Chevrolet-a perfectly ordinary Chevrolet-but it will provide you with reliable, unobtrusive transportation, just the same. You’ll enjoy the TV newsvan more, of course, but-”

“Newsvan?

What newsvan?”

Mr. Gaunt elected not to answer. “But the Chevrolet will meet all your current transportation needs, I assure you. just don’t try to run any State Police speed-traps in it. I’m afraid that wouldn’t do.

Not with this vehicle. Not at all.”

Ace heard himself say: “I sure would like to have a car like your Tucker, Mr. Gaunt, sir. It’s great.”

“Well, perhaps we can do a deal. You see, Ace, I have a very simple business policy. Would you like to know what it is?”

“Sure.” And Ace was sincere.

“Everything is for sale. That’s my philosophy. Everything is for sale.”

“Everything’s for sale,” Ace said dreamily. “Wow! Heavy!”

“Right! Heavy! Now, Ace, I believe I’ll have a bite to eat.

I’ve just been too busy to do it, holiday or no holiday. I’d ask you to join me, but-”

“Gee, I really can’t.”

“No, of course not. You have places to go and holes to dig.”

don’t you? I’ll expect you tomorrow night, between eight and nine.”

“Between eight and nine.”

“Yes. After dark.”

“When nobody knows and nobody sees,” Ace said dreamily.

“Got it in one! Goodnight, Ace.”

Mr. Gaunt held out his hand. Ace began to reach for it… and then saw there was already something in it. It was the brown rat from the trap in the storeroom. Ace pulled back with a little grunt of disgust. He hadn’t the slightest idea when Mr. Gaunt had picked up the dead rat. Or perhaps it was a different one?

Ace decided he didn’t care, one way or another. All he knew was that he had no plans to shake hands with a dead rat, no matter how cool a dude Mr. Gaunt was.

Smiling, Mr. Gaunt said: “Excuse me. Every year I grow a little more forgetful. I believe I just tried to give you my dinner, Ace!”

“Dinner,” Ace said in a faint little voice.

“Yes indeed.” A thick yellow thumbnail plunged into the white fur which covered the rat’s belly; a moment later, its intestines were oozing into Mr. Gaunt’s unmarked palm. Before Ace could see more, Mr.

Gaunt had turned away and was pulling the alley door closed. “Now, where did I put that cheese-?”

There was a heavy metallic snick! as the lock engaged.

Ace leaned over, sure he was going to vomit between his shoes.

His stomach clenched, his gorge rose… and then sank back again.

Because he hadn’t seen what he thought he’d seen. “It was a joke,” he muttered. “He had a rubber rat in his coat pocket, or something. It was just a joke.”

Was it? What about the intestines, then? And the cold, jellylike mung which had surrounded them? What about that?

You’re just tired, he thought. You imagined it, that’s all. It was a rubber rat. As for the rest… poof But for a moment everything-the deserted garage, the selfdirected Tucker, even that ominous piece of graffiti, YOGSOTHOTH RULES-tried to cram in on him, and a powerful voice yelled: Get out of here! Get out while there’s still time!

But that was the really crazy thought. There was money waiting for him out there in the night. Maybe a lot of it. Maybe a son-ofa-bitching fortune.

Ace stood in the darkness for a few minutes like a robot with a flat power-pack. Little by little some sense of reality-some sense of himself-returned, and he decided the rat didn’t matter. Neither did the Tucker Talisman. The blow mattered, and the ma mattered, and he had an idea that Mr. Gaunt’s very simple business policy mattered, but nothing else. He couldn’t let anything else matter.

He walked down the alley and around the corner to the front of Needful Things. The shop was closed and dark, like all the shops on Lower Main Street. A Chevy Celebrity was parked in one of the slant spaces in front of Mr. Gaunt’s shop, just as promised. Ace tried to remember if it had been there when he arrived with the Talisman, and really couldn’t do it. Every time he tried to cast his mind back to any memories before the last few minutes, it ran into a roadblock; he saw himself moving to accept Mr. Gaunt’s offered hand, most natural thing in the world, and suddenly realizing that Mr. Gaunt was holding a large dead rat.

I believe I’ll have a bite to eat. I’d ask you to Join me, butWell, it was just something else that didn’t matter. The Chevy was here now, and that was all that did. Ace opened the door, put the book with the precious map inside it on the seat, then pulled the keys out of the ignition. He went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. He had a good idea of what he would find, and he wasn’t disappointed. A pick and a short-handled spade were neatly crossed over each other in an X. Ace looked more closely and saw Mr. Gaunt had even put in a pair of heavy work gloves.

“Mr. Gaunt, you think of everything,” he said, and slammed the trunk. As he did, he saw there was a sticker on the Celebrity’s rear bumper, and he bent closer to read it:

I V ANTIQUES

Ace began to laugh. He was still laughing as he drove across the Tin Bridge and headed toward the old Treblehorn place, which he intended to make the site of his first dig. As he drove up Panderly’s Hill on the other side of the bridge, he passed a convertible headed in the other direction, toward town. The convertible was filled with young men. They were singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” at the top of their voices, and in perfect one-part Baptist harmony.

9

One of those young men was Lester Ivanhoe Pratt. Following the touch-football game, he and a bunch of the guys had driven up to Lake Auburn, about twenty-five miles away. There was a week-long tent revival going on up there, and Vic Tremayne had said there would be a special five o’clock Columbus Day prayer-meeting and hymn-sing. Since Sally had Lester’s car and they’d made no plans for the evening-no movie, no dinner out at McDonald’s in South Paris-he’d gone along with Vic and the other guys, good Christian fellows every one.

He knew, of course, why the other guys were so eager to make the trip, and the reason wasn’t religion-not entirely religion, anyway.

There were always lots of pretty girls at the tent revivals which crisscrossed northern New England between May and the last state fair ox-pull at the end of October, and a good hymn-sing (not to mention a mess of hot preaching and a dose of that oldtime Jesus spirit) always put them in a merry, eager mood.

Lester, who had a girl, looked upon the plans and schemes of his friends with the indulgence an old married man might show for the antics of a bunch of young bucks. He went along mostly to be friendly, and because he always liked to listen to some good preaching and do some singing after an exhilarating afternoon of headknocking and body-blocking. It was the best way of cooling down he knew.

It had been a good meeting, but an awful lot of people had wanted to be saved at the end of it. As a result, it had gone on a little longer than Lester would have wished. He had been planning to call Sally and ask her if she wanted to go out to Weeksie’s for an ice-cream soda or something. Girls liked to do things like that on the spur of the moment sometimes, he had noticed.

They crossed the Tin Bridge, and Vic let him out on the corner of Main and Watermill.

“Great game, Les!” Bill MacFarland called from the back seat.

“Sure was!” Lester called back cheerily. “Let’s do it again Saturday-maybe I can break your arm instead of just spraining it!”

The four young men in Vic’s car roared heartily at this piece of wit and then Vic drove away. The sound of “Jesus Is a Friend Forever” drifted back on air which was still strangely summery.

You expected a chill to creep into it even during the warmest spells of Indian summer weather after the sun went down. Not tonight, though.

Lester walked slowly up the hill toward home, feeling tired and sore and utterly contented. Every day was a fine day when you’d given your heart to Jesus, but some days were finer than others.

This had been one of the finest kind, and all he wanted right now was to shower up, call Sally, and then jump into bed.

He was looking up at the stars, trying to make out the constellation Orion, when he turned into his driveway. As a result he ran balls-first, and at a brisk walking pace, into the rear end of his Mustang.

“Oooof!” Lester Pratt cried. He backed up, bent over, and clasped his wounded testicles. After a few moments, he managed to raise his head and look at his car through eyes which were watering with pain. What the heck was his car doing here, anyway? Sally’s Honda wasn’t supposed to be out of the shop until at least Wednesdayprobably Thursday or Friday, with the holiday and all.

Then, in a burst of bright pink-orange light, it came to him.

Sally was inside! She had come over while he was out, and now she was waiting for him! Maybe she had decided that tonight was the night!

Premarital sex was wrong, of course, but sometimes you had to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette. And he was certainly up to the task of atoning for that particular sin if she was.

“Rooty-toot-toot!” cried Lester Pratt enthusiastically. “Sweet little Sally in her birthday suit!”

He ran for the porch in a crabby little strut, still clutching his throbbing balls. Now, however, they were throbbing with anticipation as well as pain.

He took the key from beneath the doormat and let himself in.

“Sally?” he called. “Sal, are you here? Sorry I’m late-I went over to the Lake Auburn revival meeting with some of the guys, and…” He trailed off. There was no response, and that meant she wasn’t here, after all. Unless…!

He hurried upstairs as fast as he could, suddenly sure he would find her asleep in his bed. She would open her eyes and sit up, the sheet falling away from her lovely breasts (which he had felt-well, sort of-but never actually seen); she would hold her arms out to him, those lovely, sleepy, cornflower-blue eyes opening wide, and by the time the clock struck ten, they would be virgins no longer.

Rooty-toot!

But the bedroom was as empty as the kitchen and living room had been. The sheets and blankets were on the floor, as they almost always were; Lester was one of those fellows so full of energy and the holy spirit that he could not simply sit up and get out of bed in the morning; he bounded up, eager not just to meet the day but to blitz it, knock it to the greensward, and force it to cough up the ball.

Now, however, he walked downstairs with a frown creasing his wide, ingenuous face. The car was here, but Sally wasn’t. What did that mean? He didn’t know, but he didn’t much like it.

He flipped on the porch light and went out to look in the car; maybe she had left him a note. He got as far as the head of the porch steps, then froze. There was a note, all right. It had been written across the Mustang’s windshield in hot-pink spray-paint, probably from his own garage. The big capital letters glared at him:

GO TO HELL YOU CHEATING BASTARD

Lester stood on the top porch step for a long time, reading this message from his fiancee over and over and over again. The prayermeeting? Was that it? Did she think he’d gone over to the prayermeeting in Lake Auburn to meet some floozy? In his distress, it was the only idea that made any sense to him at all.

He went inside and called Sally’s house. He let the phone ring two dozen times, but no one answered.

Sally knew he would call, and so she had asked Irene Lutjens if she could spend the night at Irene’s place. Irene, all but bursting with curiosity, said yes, sure, of course. Sally was so distressed about something that she hardly looked pretty at all. Irene could hardly believe it, but it was true.

For her own part, Sally had no intention of telling Irene or anyone else what had happened. It was too awful, too shameful.

She would carry it with her to the grave. So she refused to answer Irene’s questions for over half an hour. Then the whole story came pouring out of her in a hot flood of tears. Irene held her and listened, her eyes growing big and round.

“That’s all right,” Irene crooned, rocking Sally in her arms.

“That’s all right, Sally-Jesus loves you, even if that son of a bitch doesn’t. So do 1. So does Reverend Rose. And you certainly gave the musclebound creep something to remember you by, didn’t you?”

Sally nodded, sniffling, and the other girl stroked her hair and made soothing sounds. Irene could hardly wait until tomorrow, when she could start calling her other girlfriends. They wouldn’t believe it!

Irene felt sorry for Sally, she really did, but she was also sort of glad this had happened. Sally was so pretty, and Sally was so darned holy. It was sort of nice to see her crash and burn, just this once.

And Lester’s the best-looking guy in church. If he and Sally really do break up, I wonder if he might not ask me out? He looks at me sometimes like he’s wondering what kind of underwear I’ve got on, so

I guess it’s not impossible…

“I feel so horrible!” Sally wept. “So d-d-dirty!”

“Of course you do,” Irene said, continuing to rock her and stroke her hair. “You don’t still have the letter and that picture, do you?”

“I b-b-burned them!” Sally cried loudly against Irene’s damp bosom, and then a fresh storm of grief and loss carried her away.

“Of course you did,” Irene murmured. “It’s just what you should have done.” Still, she thought, you could have waited until I had at least one look, you wimpy thing.

Sally spent the night in Irene’s guest-room, but she hardly slept at all. Her weeping passed eventually, and she spent most of that rug ’ lit staring dry-eyed into the dark, gripped by those dark and bitterly satisfying fantasies of revenge which only a jilted and previously complacent lover can fully entertain.