Needful Things

1

Nettle lay in a plain gray casket which Polly Chalmers had paid for.

Alan had asked her to let him help share the expense, and she’d refused in that simple but final way he had come to know, respect, and accept. The coffin stood on steel runners above a plot in Homeland Cemetery near the area where Polly’s people were buried. The mound of earth next to it was covered with a carpet of bright green artificial grass which sparkled feverishly in the hot sunlight. That fake grass never failed to make Alan shudder. There was something obscene about it, something hideous. He liked it even less than the morticians’ practice of first rouging the dead and then dolling them up in their finest clothes so they looked as if they were bound for a big business meeting in Boston instead of a long season of decay amid the roots and the worms.

Reverend Tom Killingworth, the Methodist minister who conducted twice-weekly services at juniper Hill and who had known Nettle well, performed the service at Polly’s request. The homily was brief but warm, full of reference to the Nettle Cobb this man had known, a woman who had been slowly and bravely coming out of the shadows of insanity, a woman who had taken the courageous decision to try to treat once more with the world which had hurt her so badly.

“When I was growing up,” Tom Killingworth said, “my mother kept a plaque with a lovely Irish saying on it in her sewing room.

It said ’May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.’ Nettle Cobb had a hard life, in many ways a sad life, but in spite of that I do not believe she and the devil ever had much to do with each other. In spite of her terrible, untimely death, my heart believes that it is to heaven she has gone, and that the devil still hasn’t gotten the news.” Killingworth raised his arms in the traditional gesture of benediction. “Let us pray.”

From the far side of the hill, where Wilma jerzyck was being buried at the same time, came the sound of many voices rising and falling in response to Father John Brigham. Over there, cars were lined up from the burial site all the way to the cemetery’s east gate; they had come for Peter jerzyck, the living, if not for his dead wife.

Over here there were only five mourners: Polly, Alan, Rosalie Drake, old Lenny Partridge (who went to all funerals on general principles, so long as it wasn’t one of the Pope’s army getting buried), and Norris Ridgewick. Norris looked pale and distracted.

Fish must not have been biting, Alan thought.

“May the Lord bless you and keep your memories of Nettle Cobb fresh and green in your hearts,” Killingworth said, and beside Alan, Polly began to cry again. He put an arm around her and she moved against him gratefully, her hand finding his and twining in it tightly.

“May the Lord lift up His face upon you; may He shower His grace upon you; may He cheer your souls and give you peace.

Amen.”

The day was even hotter than Columbus Day had been, and when Alan raised his head, darts of bright sunlight bounced off the casket-rails and into his eyes. He wiped his free hand across his forehead, where a solid summer sweat had broken. Polly fumbled in her purse for a fresh Kleenex and wiped her streaming eyes with it.

“Honey, are you all right?” Alan asked.

“Yes… but I have to cry for her, Alan. Poor Nettle. Poor, poor Nettle. Why did this happen? Why?” And she began to sob again.

Alan, who wondered exactly the same thing, gathered her into his arms. Over her shoulder he saw Norris wandering away toward where the cars belonging to Nettle’s mourners were huddled, looking like a man who either doesn’t know where he is going or who isn’t quite awake.

Alan frowned. Then Rosalie Drake approached Norris, said something to him, and Norris gave her a hug.

Alan thought, He knew her, too-he’s just sad, that’s all. You’re jumping at an almighty lot of shadows these days-maybe the real question here is what’s the matter with you?

Then Killingworth was there and Polly was turning to thank him, getting herself under control. Killingworth held out his hands.

With guarded amazement Alan watched the fearless way Polly allowed her own hand to be swallowed up in the minister’s larger ones. He could not remember ever seeing Polly offer one of her hands so freely and unthoughtfully.

She’s not just a little better; she’s a lot better. What in the hell happened?

On the other side of the hill, Fatherjohn Brigham’s nasal, rather irritating voice proclaimed: “Peace be with you.”

“And with you,” the mourners replied en masse.

Alan looked at the plain gray casket beside that hideous swath of fake green grass and thought, Peace be with you, Nettle. Now and at last, peace be with you.

2

As the twin funerals at Homeland were winding up, Eddie Warburton was parking in front of Polly’s house. He slipped from his car-not a nice new car like the one that honky bastard down at the Sunoco had wrecked, just transportation-and looked cautiously both ways.

Everything seemed fine; the street was dozing through what might have been an afternoon in early August.

Eddie hurried up Polly’s walk, fumbling an official-looking envelope out of his shirt as he went. Mr. Gaunt had called him only ten minutes ago, telling him it was time to finish paying for his medallion, and here he was… of course. Mr. Gaunt was the sort of guy who, when he said frog, you jumped.

Eddie climbed the three steps to Polly’s porch. A hot little gust of breeze stirred the windchimes above the door, making them jingle softly together. It was the most civilized sound imaginable, but Eddie jumped slightly anyway. He took another look around, saw no one, then looked down at the envelope again. Addressed to “Ms. Patricia Chalmers"-pretty hoity-toity! Eddie hadn’t the slightest idea that Polly’s real first name was Patricia, nor did he care. His job was to do this little trick and then get the hell out of here.

He dropped the letter into the mail-slot. It fluttered down and landed on top of the other mail: two catalogues and a cable-TV brochure. just a business-length envelope with Polly’s name and address centered below the metered mail stamp in the upper right corner and the return address in the upper left: San Francisco Department of Child Welfare 666 Geary Street San Francisco, California 94112

3

“What is it?” Alan asked as he and Polly walked slowly down the hill toward Alan’s station wagon. He had hoped to pass at least a word with Norris, but Norris had already gotten into his VW and taken off.

Back to the lake for a little more fishing before the sun went down, probably.

Polly looked up at him, still red-eyed and too pale, but smiling tentatively. “What is what?”

“Your hands. What’s made them all better? It’s like magic.”

“Yes,” she said, and held them out before her, splay-fingered, so they could both look at them. “It is, isn’t it?” Her smile was a little more natural now.

Her fingers were still twisted, still crooked, and the joints were still bunched, but the acute swelling which had been there Friday night was almost completely gone.

“Come on, lady. Give.”

“I’m not sure I want to tell you,” she said. “I’m a little embarrassed, actually.”

They stopped and waved at Rosalie as she drove by in her old blue Toyota.

“Come on,” Alan said. “’Fess up.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess it was just a matter of finally meeting the right doctor.” Slow color was rising in her cheeks.

“Who’s that?”

“Dr. Gaunt,” she said with a nervous little laugh. “Dr. Leland Gaunt.”

“Gaunt!” He looked at her in surprise. “What does he have to do with your hands?”

“Drive me down to his shop and I’ll tell you on the way.”

4

Five minutes later (one of the nicest things about living in Castle Rock, Alan sometimes thought, was that almost everything was only five minutes away), he swung into one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. There was a sign in the window, one Alan had seen before:

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

It suddenly occurred to Alan-who hadn’t thought about this aspect of the new store at all until now-that closed except “by appointment” was one fuck of a strange way to run a small-town business.

“Alan?” Polly asked hesitantly. “You look mad.”

“I’m not mad,” he said. “What in the world do I have to be mad about? The truth is, I don’t know how I feel. I guess-” He uttered a short laugh, shook his head, and started again. “I guess I’m what Todd used to call ’gabberflasted.’ Quack remedies? It just doesn’t seem like you, Polly.”

Her lips tightened at once, and there was a warning in her eyes when she turned to look at him. “’Quack’ isn’t the word I’d have used.

Quack is for ducks and… and prayer-wheels from the ads in the back of Inside View. ’Quack’ is the wrong word to use if a thing works, Alan. Do you think I’m wrong?”

He opened his mouth-to say what, he wasn’t sure-but she went on before he could say anything.

“Look at this.” She held her hands out in the sunshine flooding through the windshield, then opened them and closed them effortlessly several times.

“All right. Poor choice of words. What I-”

“Yes, I’d say so. A very poor choice.”

“I’m sorry.”

She turned all the way around to face him then, sitting where Annie had so often sat, sitting in what had once been the Pangborn family car. Why haven’t I traded this thing yet? Alan wondered.

What am I-crazy?

Polly placed her hands gently over Alan’s. “Oh, this is starting to feel really uncomfortable-we never argue, and I’m not going to start now. I buried a good companion today. I’m not going to have a fight with my boyfriend, as well.”

A slow grin lit his face. “That what I am? Your boyfriend?”

“Well… you’re my friend. Can I at least say that?”

He hugged her, a little astonished at how close they had come to having harsh words. And not because she felt worse; because she felt better. “Honey, you can say anything you want. I love you a bunch.”

“And we’re not going to fight, no matter what.”

He nodded solemnly. “No matter what.”

“Because I love you, too, Alan.”

He kissed her cheek, then let her go. “Let me see this ashcan thing he gave you.”

“It’s not an ashcan, it’s an azka- And he didn’t give it to me, he loaned it to me on a trial basis. That’s why I’m here-to buy it. I told you that. I just hope he doesn’t want the moon and stars for it.”

Alan looked at the sign in the display window, and at the shade pulled down over the door. He thought, I’m afraid that’s just what he is going to want, darlin.

He didn’t like any of this. He had found it hard to take his eyes away from Polly’s hands during the funeral service he had watched her manipulate the catch on her purse effortlessly, dip into her bag for a Kleenex, then close the catch with the tips of her fingers instead of shuffling the bag awkwardly around so she could do it with her thumbs, which were usually a good deal less painful. He knew her hands were better, but this story about a magic charmand that was what it came down to when you scraped the frosting off the cake-made him extremely nervous. It reeked of confidence game.

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

No-except for a few fancy restaurants like Maurice, he hadn’t seen a business that kept appointment-only hours since he’d come to Maine.

And you could walk right off the street and get a table at Maurice nine times out of ten… except in the summer, of course, when the tourists were spawning.

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

Nevertheless, he had seen (out of the corner of his eye, as it were) people going in and out all week long. Not in droves, maybe, but it was clear that Mr. Gaunt’s way of doing business hadn’t hurt him any, odd or not. Sometimes his customers came in little groups, but far more often they seemed to be on their own… or so it seemed to Alan now, casting his mind back over the previous week.

And wasn’t that how con-men worked? They split you off from the herd, got you on your own, made you comfortable, and then showed you how you could own the Lincoln Tunnel for this one-time-only low price.

“Alan?” Her fist knocked lightly on his forehead. “Alan, are you in there?”

He looked back at her with a smile. “I’m here, Polly.”

She had worn a dark-blue jumper with a matching blue stock tie to Nettle’s funeral. While Alan was thinking, she had taken off the tie and dextrously unbuttoned the top two buttons of the white blouse underneath.

“More!” he said with a leer. “Cleavage! We want cleavage!”

“Stop,” she said primly but with a smile. “We’re sitting in the middle of Main Street and it’s two-thirty in the afternoon. Besides, we ve just come from a funeral, in case you forgot.”

He started. “Is it really that late?”

“If two-thirty’s late, it’s late.” She tapped his wrist. “Do you ever look at the thing you’ve got strapped on there?”

He looked at it now and saw it was closer to two-forty than twothirty. Middle School broke at three o’clock. If he was going to be there when Brian Rusk got out, he had to get moving right away.

“Let me see your trinket,” he said.

She grasped the fine silver chain around her neck and pulled out the small silver object on the end of it. She cupped it in her palm… then closed her hand over it when he moved to touch it.

“Uh… I don’t know if you’re supposed to.” She was smiling, but the move he’d made had clearly left her uncomfortable. “It might screw up the vibrations, or something.”

“Oh, come on, Polly,” he said, annoyed.

“Look,” she said, “let’s get something straight, okay? Want to?”

The anger was back in her voice. She was trying to control it, but it was there. “It’s easy for you to make light of this. You’re not the one with the oversized buttons on the telephone, or the oversized Percodan prescription.”

“Hey, Polly! That’s-”

“No, never mind hey Polly.” Bright spots of color had mounted in her cheeks. Part of her anger, she would think later, sprang from a very simple source: on Sunday, she had felt exactly as Alan felt now. Something had happened since then to change her mind, and dealing with that change was not easy. “This thing works. I know it’s crazy, but it does work. On Sunday morning, when Nettle came over, I was in agony. I’d started thinking about how the real solution to all my problems might be a double amputation. The pain was so bad, Alan, that I turned that thought over with a feeling that was almost surprise. Like’Oh yeah-amputation! Why haven’t I thought of that before? It’s so obvious!’ Now, just two days later, all I’ve got is what Dr. Van Allen calls ’fugitive pain,’ and even that seems to be going away. I remember about a year ago I spent a week on a brown-rice diet because that was supposed to help. Is this so different?”

The arger had gone out of her voice as she spoke, and now she was looking at him almost pleadingly.

“I don’t know, Polly. I really don’t.”

She had opened her hand again, and she now held the azka between her thumb and forefinger. Alan bent close to look at ’ it, but made no move to touch it this time. It was a small silver object, not quite round. Tiny holes, not much bigger than the black dots which make up newsprint photographs, studded its lower half. It gleamed mellowly in the sunlight.

And as Alan looked at it, a powerful, irrational feeling swept him: he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He resisted a brief, powerful urge to simply rip it off Polly’s neck and throw it out the open window.

Yes! Good idea, sport! You do that and you’ll be picking your teeth out of your lap!

“Sometimes it almost feels like something is moving around inside of it,” Polly said, smiling. “Like a Mexican jumping bean, or something. Isn’t that silly?”

“I don’t know.”

He watched her drop it back inside her blouse with a strong sense of misgiving… but once it was out of sight and her fingersher undeniably limber fingers-had gone to work re-buttoning the top of her blouse, the feeling began to fade. What didn’t was his growing suspicion that Mr. Leland Gaunt was conning the woman he loved… and if he was, she would not be the only one “Have you thought it could be something else?” Now he was moving with the delicacy of a man using slick stepping-stones to cross a swift-running stream. “You’ve had remissions before, you know.”

“Of course I know,” Polly said with edgy patience. “They’re my hands.”

“Polly, I’m just trying-”

“I knew you’d probably react just the way you are reacting, Alan. The fact is simple enough: I know what arthritic remission feels like, and brother, this isn’t it. I’ve had times over the last five or six years when I felt pretty good, but I never felt this good even during the best of them. This is different.

This is like…” She paused, thought, then made a small frustrated gesture that was mostly hands and shoulders. “This is like being well again. I don’t expect you to understand exactly what I mean, but I can’t put it any better than that.”

He nodded, frowning. He did understand what she was saying, and he also understood that she meant it. Perhaps the azka had unlocked some dormant healing power in her own mind. Was that possible, even though the disease in question wasn’t psychosomatic in origin? The Rosicrucians thought stuff like that happened all the time. So did the millions of people who had bought L. Ron Hubbard’s book on Dianetics, for that matter. He himself didn’t know; the only thing he could say for sure was that he had never seen a blind person think himself back to sight or a wounded person stop his bleeding by an effort of concentration.

What he did know was this: something about the situation smelled wrong. Something about it smelled as high as dead fish that have spent three days in the hot sun.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Polly said. “Trying not to be mad at you is wearing me out. Come inside with me. Talk to Mr. Gaunt yourself. It’s time you met him anyway. Maybe he can explain better what the charm does… and what it doesn’t do.”

He looked at his watch again. Fourteen minutes of three now.

For a brief moment he thought of doing as she suggested, and leaving Brian Rusk for later. But catching the boy as he came out of school-catching him while he was away from home-felt right.

He would get better answers if he talked to him away from his mother, who would hang around them like a lioness protecting her cub, interrupting, perhaps even telling her son not to answer. Yes, that was the bottom line: if it turned out her son had something to hide, or if Mrs. Rusk even thought he did, Alan might find it difficult or impossible to get the information he needed.

Here he had a potential con artist; in Brian Rusk he might have the key that would unlock a double murder.

“I can’t, honey,” he said. “Maybe a little later today. I have to go over to the Middle School and talk to someone, and I ought to do it right away.”

“Is it about Nettle?”

“It’s about Wilma jerzyck… but if my hunch is right, Nettle comes into it, yes. If I find anything out, I’ll tell you later. In the meantime, will you do something for me?”

“Alan, I’m buying it! They’re not your hands!”

“No, I expect you to buy it. I want you to pay him by check, that’s all. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t take one-if he’s a reputable businessman, that is. You live in town and you bank right across the street. But if something shakes out funny, you’ve got a few days to Put a stop on payment.”

“I see,” Polly said. Her voice was calm, but Alan realized with a sinking feeling that he had finally missed his footing on one of those slippery stepping-stones and fallen headlong into the stream.

“You think he’s a crook, don’t you, Alan? You think he’s going to take the gullible little lady’s money, fold his tent, and steal off into the night.”

“I don’t know,” Alan said evenly. “What I do know is that he’s only been doing business here in town for a week. So a check seems like a reasonable precaution to take.”

Yes, he was being reasonable. Polly recognized that. It was that very reasonableness, that stubborn rationality in the face of what seemed to her to be an authentic miracle cure, that was now driving her anger. She fought an urge to begin snapping her fingers in his face, shouting Do you SEE that, Alan? Are you BLIND? as she did so. The fact that Alan was right, that Mr. Gaunt should have no problem at all with her check if he was on the up-and-up, only made her angrier.

Be careful, a voice whispered. Be careful, don’t be hasty, turn on brain before throwing mouth in gear. Remember that you love this man.

But another voice answered, a colder voice, one she barely recognized as her own: Do I? Do I really?

“All right,” she said, tight-lipped, and slid across the seat and away from him. “Thank you for looking after my best interests, Alan.

Sometimes I forget how badly I need someone to do that, you see. I’ll be sure to write him a check.”

Polly"No, Alan. No more talk now. I can’t not be mad at you any longer today.” She opened the door and got out in one lithe gesture.

The jumper rode up, revealing a momentary heart-stopping length of thigh.

He started to get out on his own side, wanting to catch her, talk to her, smooth it over, make her see that he had only voiced his doubts because he cared about her. Then he looked at his watch again. It was nine minutes of three. Even if he pushed it, he might miss Brian Rusk.

“I’ll talk to you tonight,” he called out the window.

“Fine,” she said. “You do that, Alan.” She went directly to the door beneath the canopy without turning around. Before he put the station wagon in reverse and backed out into the street, Alan heard the tinkle of a small silver bell.

5

“Ms. Chalmers!” Mr. Gaunt cried cheerfully, and made a small check-mark on the sheet beside the cash register. He was nearing the bottom of it now: Polly’s was the last name but one.

“Please… Polly,” she said.

“Excuse me.” His smile widened. “Polly.”

She smiled back at him, but the smile was forced. Now that she was in here, she felt a keen sorrow at the angry way she and Alan had parted. Suddenly she found herself struggling just to keep from bursting into tears.

“Ms. Chalmers? Polly? Are you feeling unwell?” Mr. Gaunt came around the counter. “You look a trifle pale.” His face was furrowed with genuine concern. This is the man Alan thinks is a crook, Polly thought. If he could only see him now"It’s the sun, I think,” she said in a voice that was not quite even. “It’s so warm outside.”

“But cool in here,” he said soothingly. “Come, Polly. Come and sit down.”

He led her, his hand near but not quite touching the small of her back, to one of the red velvet chairs. She sat upon it, knees together.

“I happened to be looking out the window,” he said, sitting in the chair next to hers and folding his long hands into his lap. “It looked to me as if you and the Sheriff might be arguing.”

“it’s nothing,” she said, but then a single large tear overspilled the corner of her left eye and rolled down her cheek.

“On the contrary,” he said. “It means a great deal.”

She looked up at him, surprised… and Mr. Gaunt’s hazel eyes captured hers. Had they been hazel before? She couldn’t remember, not for certain. All she knew was that as she looked into them, she felt all the day’s misery-poor Nettle’s funeral, then the stupid fight she’d had with Alan-begin to dissolve.

“It… it does?”

“Polly,” he said softly, “I think everything is going to turn out just fine. If you trust me. Do you? Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Polly said, although something inside, something far and faint, cried out a desperate warning. “I do-no matter what Alan says, I trust you with all my heart.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Mr. Gaunt said. He reached out and took one of Polly’s hands. Her face wrinkled in disgust for a moment, and then relaxed into its former blank and dreaming expression.

“That’s just fine. And your friend the Sheriff needn’t have worried, you know; your personal check is just as good as gold with me.”

6

Alan saw he was going to be late unless he turned on the flasherbubble and stuck it on the roof. He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want Brian Rusk to see a police car; he wanted him to see a slightly down-at-the-heels station wagon, just like the kind his own dad probably drove.

It was too late to make it to the school before it let out for the day. Alan parked at the intersection of Main and School streets instead. This was the most logical way for Brian to come; he would just have to hope that logic would work somewhere along the line today.

Alan got out, leaned against the station wagon’s bumper, and felt in his pocket for a stick of chewing gum. He was unwrapping it when he heard the three o’clock bell at the Middle School, dreamy and distant in the warm air.

He decided to talk to Mr. Leland Gaunt of Akron, Ohio, as soon as he finished with Brian Rusk, appointment or no appointment… and just as abruptly changed his mind. He’d call the Attorney General’s Office in Augusta first, have them check Gaunt’s name against the con file. If there was nothing there, they could send the name on to the LAWS R amp; I computer in WashingtonLAWS, in Alan’s opinion, was one of the few good things the Nixon administration had ever done.

The first kids were coming down the street now, yelling, skipping, laughing. A sudden idea struck Alan, and he opened the driver’s door of the station wagon. He reached across the seat, opened the glove compartment, and pawed through the stuff inside.

Todd’s joke can of nuts fell out onto the floor as he did so.

Alan was about to give up when he found what he wanted. He took it, slammed the glove compartment shut, and backed out of the car. He was holding a small cardboard envelope with a sticker on it that said: The Folding Flower Trick Blackstone Magic Co.

19 Greer St.

Paterson, Nj.

From this packet Alan slipped an even smaller square-a thick block of multicolored tissue-paper. He slipped it beneath his watchband.

All magicians have a number of “palming wells” on their persons and about their clothes, and each has his own favorite well.

Under the watchband was Alan’s.

With the famous Folding Flowers taken care of, Alan went back to watching for Brian Rusk. He saw a boy on a bike, cutting jazzily in and out through the clots of pint-sized pedestrians, and was alert at once. Then he saw it was one of the Hanlon twins, and allowed himself to relax again.

“slow down or I’ll give you a ticket,” Alan growled as the boy shot past. jay Hanlon looked at him, startled, and almost ran into a tree. He pedaled on at a much more sedate speed.

Alan watched him for a moment, amused, then turned back in the direction of the school and resumed his watch for Brian Rusk.

7

Sally Ratcliffe climbed the stairs from her little speech therapy room to the first floor of the Middle School five minutes after the three o’clock bell and walked down the main hall toward the office.

The hall was clearing rapidly, as it always did on days when the weather was fair and warm. Outside, droves of kids were shouting their way across the lawn to where the #2 and #3 buses idled sleepily at the curb. Sally’s low heels clicked and clacked. She was holding a manila envelope in one hand. The name on this envelope, Frank jewett, was turned in against her gently rounded breast.

She paused at Room 6, one door down from the office, and looked in through the wire-reinforced glass. Inside, Mr. jewett was talking to the half-dozen teachers who were involved in coaching fall and winter sports. Frank Jewett was a pudgy little man who always reminded Sally of Mr. Weatherbee, the principal in the Archie comics. Like Mr.

Weatherbee’s, his glasses were always siding down on his nose.

Sitting to his right was Alice Tanner, the school secretary. She appeared to be taking notes.

Mr. jewett glanced to his left, saw Sally looking in the window, and gave her one of his prissy little smiles. She raised one hand in a wave and made herself smile back. She could remember the days when smiling had come naturally to her; next to praying, smiling had been the most natural thing in the world.

Some of the other teachers looked over to see who their fearless leader was looking at. So did Alice Tanner. Alice waggled her fingers coyly at Sally, smiling with saccharine sweetness.

They know, Sally thought. Every one of them knows that Lester and I are history. Irene was so sweet last night… so sympathetic… and so anxious to spill her guts. That little bitch.

Sally waggled her fingers right back, feeling her own coy-and totally bogus-smile stretch her lips. I hope you get hit by a dumptruck on your way home, you whory-looking thing, she thought, and then walked on, her sensible low heels clicking and clacking.

When Mr. Gaunt had called her during her free period and told her it was time to finish paying for the wonderful splinter, Sally had reacted with enthusiasm and a sour kind of pleasure. She sensed that the “little joke” she had promised to play on Mr. jewett was a mean one, and that was all right with her. She felt mean today.

She put her hand on the office door… then paused.

What’s the matter with you? she wondered suddenly. You have the splinter… the wonderful, holy splinter with the wonderful, holy vision caught inside it. Aren’t things like that supposed to make a person feel better? Calmer? More in touch with God the Father Almighty? You don’t feel calmer and more in touch with anyone. You feel like someone filled your head up with barbed wire.

“Yes, but that’s not my fault, or the splinter’s fault,” Sally muttered. “That’s Lester’s fault. Mr. Lester Big-Prick Pratt.”

A short girl wearing glasses and heavy braces turned from the Pep Club poster she’d been studying and glanced curiously at Sally.

“What are you looking at, Irvina?” Sally asked.

Irvina blinked. “Nuffink, Miz Rat-Cliff.”

“Then go look at it someplace else,” Sally snapped. “School is out, you know.”

Irvina hurried down the hall, throwing an occasional distrustful glance back over her shoulder.

Sally opened the door to the office and went in. The envelope she carried had been right where Mr. Gaunt had told her it would be, behind the garbage cans outside the cafeteria doors. She had written Mr. Jewett’s name on it herself She took one more quick glance over her shoulder to make sure that little whore Alice Tanner wasn’t coming in. Then she opened the door to the inner office, hurried across the room, and laid the manila envelope on Frank jewett’s desk. Now there was the other thing.

She opened the top desk drawer and removed a pair of heavy scissors. She bent and yanked on the lower left-hand drawer. It was locked. Mr. Gaunt had told her that would probably be the case.

Sally glanced into the outer office, saw it was still empty, the door to the hallway still shut. Good. Great. She jammed the tips of the scissors into the crack at the top of the locked drawer and levered them up, hard. Wood splintered, and Sally felt her nipples grow strangely, pleasantly hard. This was sort of fun. Scary, but fun.

She re-seated the scissors-the points went in farther this time and levered them up again. The lock snapped and the drawer rolled open on its casters, revealing what was inside. Sally’s mouth dropped open in shocked surprise. Then she began to giggle-breathy, stifled sounds that were really closer to screams than to laughter.

“Oh Mr. Jewett! What a naughty boy you are!”

There was a stack of digest-sized magazines inside the drawer, and Naughty Boy was, in fact, the name of the one on top. The blurry picture on the cover showed a boy of about nine. He was wearing a ’50’s-style motorcycle cap and nothing else.

Sally reached into the drawer and pulled out the magazinesthere were a dozen of them, maybe more. Happy Kids. Nude Cuti’es.

Blowing in the Wind. Bobby’s Farm World. She looked into one and could barely believe what she was seeing. Where did things like this come from? They surely didn’t sell them down at the drugstore, not even on the top rack Rev. Rose sometimes preached about in church, the one with the sign that said ONLY EYES 18 YRS AND OLDER PLEASE.

A voice she knew very well suddenly spoke up in her head.

Hurry, Sally. The meeting’s almost over, and you don’t want to be caught in here, do you?

And then there was another voice as well, a woman’s voice, one Sally could almost put a name to. Hearing this second voice was like being on the telephone with someone while someone else spoke in the background on the other end of the line.

More than fair, this second voice said. It seems divine.

Sally tuned the voice out and did what Mr. Gaunt had told her to do: she scattered the dirty magazines all over Mr. jewett’s office.

Then she replaced the scissors and left the room quickly, pulling the door shut behind her. She opened the door of the outer office and peeked out. No one there… but the voices from Room 6 were louder now, and people were laughing. They were getting ready to break up; it had been an unusually short meeting.

Thank God for Mr. Gaunt! she thought, and slipped out into the hall. She had almost reached the front doors when she heard them coming out of Room 6 behind her. Sally didn’t look around.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought of Mr. Lester Big-Prick Pratt for the last five minutes, and that was really fine.

She thought she might go home and draw herself a nice bubble-bath and get into it with her wonderful splinter and spend the next two hours not thinking about Mr. Lester Big-Prick Pratt, and what a lovely change that would be! Yes, indeed! Yes, indWhat did you do in there?

What was in that envelope? Who put it there, outside the cafeteria?

When? And, most important of all, Sally, what are you starting?

She stood still for a moment, feeling little beads of sweat form on her forehead and in the hollows of her temples. Her eyes went wide and startled, like the eyes of a frightened doe. Then they narrowed and she began to walk again. She was wearing slacks, and they chafed at her in a strangely pleasant way that made her think of her frequent necking sessions with Lester.

I don’t care what I did, she thought. In fact, I hope it’s something really mean. He deserves a mean trick, looking like Mr.

Weatherbee but having all those disgusting magazines. I hope he chokes when he walks into his office.

“Yes, I hope he fucking chokes,” she whispered. It was the first time in her life she had actually said the f-word out loud, and her nipples tightened and began to tingle again. Sally began to walk faster, thinking in some vague way that there might be something else she could do in the bathtub. It suddenly seemed to her that she had a need or two of her own. She wasn’t sure exactly how to satisfy them… but she had an idea she could find out.

The Lord, after all, helped those who helped themselves.

8

“Does that seem like a fair price?” Mr. Gaunt asked Polly.

Polly started to reply, then paused. Mr. Gaunt’s attention suddenly seemed to be diverted; he was gazing off into space and his lips were moving soundlessly, as if in prayer.

“Mr. Gaunt?”

He started slightly. Then his eyes returned to her and he smiled.

“Pardon me, Polly. My mind wanders sometimes.”

“The price seems more than fair,” Polly told him. “It seems divine.” She took her checkbook from her purse and began to write.

Every now and then she would wonder vaguely just what she was up to here, and then she would feel Mr. Gaunt’s eyes call hers.

When she looked up and met them, the questions and doubts subsided again.

The check she handed to him was drawn in the amount of forty-six dollars. Mr. Gaunt folded it neatly and tucked it into the lapel pocket of his sport-jacket.

“Be sure to fill out the counterfoil,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Your snoopy friend will undoubtedly want to see it.”

“He’s coming to see you,” Polly said, doing exactly as Mr. Gaunt had suggested. “He thinks you’re a confidence man.”

“He’s got lots of thoughts and lots of plans,” Mr. Gaunt said, “but his plans are going to change and his thoughts are going to blow away like fog on a windy morning. Take my word for it.”

“You… you’re not going to hurt him, are you?”

“Me? You do me a very great wrong, Patricia Chalmers. I am a pacifist-one of the world’s great pacifists. I wouldn’t raise a hand against our Sheriff. I just meant that he’s got business on the other side of the bridge this afternoon. He doesn’t know it yet, but he does. “Oh.”

“Now, Polly?”

“Yes?”

“Your check does not constitute complete payment for the azka. “It doesn’t?”

“No.” He was holding a plain white envelope in his hands. Polly didn’t have the slightest idea where it had come from, but that seemed perfectly all right. “In order to finish paying for your amulet, Polly, you have to help me play a little trick on someone.”

“Alan?” Suddenly she was as alarmed as a woods-rabbit which gets a dry whiff of fire on a hot summer afternoon. “Do you mean Alan?”

“I most certainly do not,” he said. “Asking you to play a trick on someone you know, let alone someone you think you love, would be unethical, my dear.”

“It would?”

“Yes… although I believe you really ought to think carefully about your relationship with the Sheriff, Polly. You may find that it all comes down to a fairly simple choice: a little pain now to save a great deal of pain later. Put another way, those who marry in haste often live to repent in leisure.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I know you don’t. You’ll understand me better, Polly, after you check your mail. You see, I’m not the only one who has attracted his snooping, sniffy nose. For now, let us discuss the small prank I want you to play. The butt of this joke is a fellow whom I have just recently employed. His name is Merrill.”

“Ace Merrill?”

His smile faded. “Don’t interrupt me, Polly. Don’t ever interrupt me when I am speaking. Not unless you want your hands to swell up like innertubes filled with poison gas.”

She shrank away from him, her dreamy, dreaming eyes wide.

“I… I’m sorry.”

“All right. Your apology is accepted… this time. Now listen to me. Listen very carefully.”

9

Frank Jewett and Brion McGinley, the Middle School’s geography teacher and basketball coach, walked from Room 6 into the outer office)just behind Alice Tanner. Frank was grinning and telling Brion a joke he’d heard earlier that day from a textbook salesman. It had to do with a doctor who was finding it difficult to diagnose a woman’s illness. He had narrowed it down to two possibles-AIDS or Alzheimer’s-but that was as far as he could go.

“So the gal’s husband takes the doctor aside,” Frank went on as they walked into the outer office. Alice was bending over her desk, thumbing through a little pile of messages there, and Frank lowered his voice. Alice could be quite the stick when it came to jokes which were even slightly off-color.

“Yeah?” Now Brion was also beginning to grin.

“Yeah.” He’s real upset. He says, “Jeer, Doc-is that the best you can do? Isn’t there some way we can figure out which one she has?”

“Alice selected two of the pink message forms and started into the inner office with them. She got as far as the doorway and then stopped short, as if she’d walked into an invisible stone wall. Neither of the grinning middle-aged small-town white guys noticed.

“Sure, it’s easy,” the doc says. “Take her about twenty-five miles into the woods and leave her there. If she finds her way back, don’t fuck her.”

“Brion McGinley gaped foolishly at his boss for a moment, then exploded into hearty guffaws of laughter. Principal jewett joined him. They were laughing so hard that neither of them heard Alice the first time she called Frank’s name. There was no problem the second time. The second time she nearly shrieked it.

Frank hurried over to her. “Alice? What-” Then he saw what, and a terrible, glassy fright filled him. His words dried up. He felt the flesh of his testicles crawling madly; his balls seemed to be trying to pull themselves back to where they had come from.

It was the magazines.

The secret magazines from the bottom drawer.

They had been spread all over the office like nightmare confetti: boys in uniforms, boys in haylofts, boys in straw hats, boys riding hobby-horses.

“What in God’s name?” The voice, hoarse with horror and fascination, came from Frank’s left. He turned his head in that direction (the tendons in his neck creaking like rusty screen-door springs) and saw Brion McGinley staring at the wild strew of magazines.

His eyes were all but falling out of his face.

A prank, he tried to say. A stupid prank, that’s all, those magazines are not mine. You only have to look at me to know that magazines like that would hold no… hold no interest for a man… a man of MY… MY…

His what?

He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter, anyway, because he had lost his ability to speak. Entirely lost it.

The three adults stood in shocked silence, staring into the office of Middle School Principal Frank Jewett. A magazine which had been precariously balanced on the edge of the visitor’s chair riffled its pages in response to a puff of hot air through the half-open window and then fell to the floor. Saucy Young Guys, the cover promised.

A prank, yes, I’ll say i’t was a prank, but will they believe me?

Suppose the desk drawer was forced? Will they believe me if it was?

“Mrs. Tanner?” a girl’s voice asked from behind them.

10

All three of them-jewett, Tanner, McGinley-whirled around guiltily. Two girls in red-and-white cheerleading outfits, eighthgraders, stood there. Alice Tanner and Brion McGinley moved almost simultaneously to block the view into Frank’s office (Frank Jewett himself seemed rooted to the spot, turned to stone), but they moved just a little too late. The cheerleaders’ eyes widened.

One of them-Darlene Vickery-clapped her hands to her small rosebud mouth and stared at Frank jewett unbelievingly.

Frank thought: Oh good. By noon tomorrow, every student in this school will know. By supper tomorrow night, everyone in town will know.

“You girls leave,” Mrs. Tanner said. “Someone has played a nasty joke on Mr. jewett-a very nasty joke-and you are not to say one word.

Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Erin McAvoy said; three minutes later she would be telling her best friend, Donna Beaulieu, that Mr. Jewett’s office had been decorated with pictures of boys wearing heavy metal bracelets and little else.

“Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” Darlene Vickery said; five minutes later she would be telling her best friend, Natalie Priest.

“Go on,” Brion McGinley said. He was trying to sound brisk, but his voice was still thick with shock. “Off you go.”

The two girls fled, cheerleader skirts flipping about their sturdy knees.

Brion turned slowly to Frank. “I think-” he began, but Frank paid no notice. He walked into his office, moving slowly, like a man in a dream. He closed the door with the word P R I N C I PA L lettered on it in neat black strokes, and slowly began picking up the magazines.

Why don’t you just give them a written confession? part of his mind screamed.

He ignored the voice. A deeper part of him, the primitive voice of survival, was also speaking, and this part told him that right now he was at his most vulnerable. If he talked to Alice or Brion now, if he tried to explain this, he would hang himself as high as Haman.

Alice was knocking on the door. Frank ignored her and continued his dream-walk around the office, picking up the magazines he had accumulated over the last nine years, writing away for them one by one and picking them up at the post office in Gates Falls, sure each time that the State Police or a team of Postal Inspectors would fall on him like a ton of bricks. None ever had. But now… this.

They won’t believe they belong to you, the primitive voice said.

They won’t allow themselves to believe it-to do that would upset too many of their comfy small-town conceptions of life. Once you get yourself under control, you should be able to put it over.

But… who would have done something like this? Who could have done something like this? (It never occurred to Frank to ask himself what mad compulsion had caused him to bring the magazines herehere, of all places-in the first place.) There was only one person Frank jewett could think of-the one person from The Rock with whom he’d shared his secret life.

George T. Nelson, the high school wood shop teacher. George T.

Nelson, who, under his bluff, macho exterior, was just as gay as old dad’s hatband. George T. Nelson, with whom Frank jewett had once attended a sort of party in Boston, the sort of party where there were a great many middle-aged men and a small group of undressed boys. The sort of party that could land you in jail for the rest of your life.

The sort of partyThere was a manila envelope sitting on his desk blotter. His name was written on the center of it. Frank jewett felt a horrible sinking sensation in the pit of his belly. It felt like an elevator out of control. He looked up and saw Alice and Brion peering in at him, almost cheek to cheek. Their eyes were wide, their mouths open, and Frank thought: Now I know what it feels like to be a fish in an aquarium.

He waved at them-go away! They didn’t go, and this somehow did not surprise him. This was a nightmare, and in nightmares, things never went the way you wanted them to. That was why they were nightmares. He felt a terrible sense of loss and disorientation… but somewhere beneath it, like a living spark beneath a heap of wet kindling, was a little blue flame of anger.

He sat behind his desk and put the stack of magazines on the floor. He saw that the drawer they’d been in had been forced, just as he had feared. He ripped open the envelope and spilled out the contents. Most of them were glossy photographs. Photographs of him and George T. Nelson at that party in Boston. They were cavorting with a number of nice young fellows (the oldest of the nice young fellows might have been twelve), and in each picture George T. Nelson’s face was obscured but Frankjewett’s was crystal clear.

This didn’t much surprise Frank, either.

There was a note in the envelope. He took it out and read it.

Frank old Buddy, Sorry to do this, but I have to leave town and have no time to fuck around. I want $2,000. Bring it to my house tonight at 7:00 p.m. So far you can wiggle out of this thing, it will be tough but no real problem for a slippery bastard like you, but ask yourself how you’re going to like seeing copies of these pix nailed up on every phone pole in town, right under those Casino Nite posters.

They will run you out of town on a rail, old Buddy. Remember, $2,000 at my house by 7:15 at’the latest or you will wish you were born without a dick.

Your friend, George Your friend.

Your friend!

His eyes kept returning to that closing line with a kind of incredulous, wondering horror.

Your motherfucking backstabbing Judas-kissing FRIEND!

Brion McGinley was still hammering on the door, but when Frank jewett finally looked up from whatever it was on his desk which had taken his attention, Brion’s fist paused in mid-stroke.

The principal’s face was waxy white except for two bright clownspots of flush on his cheeks. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a narrow smile.

He didn’t look in the least like Mr. Weatherbee.

Myfriend, Frank thought. He crumpled the note with one hand as he shoved the glossy photographs back into the envelope with the other.

Now the blue spark of anger had turned orange. The wet kindling was catching fire. I’ll be there, all right. I’ll be there to discuss this matter with my friend George T. Nelson.

“Yes indeed,” Frank Jewett said. “Yes indeed.” He began to smile.

It was going on quarter past three and Alan had decided Brian Rusk must have taken a different route; the flood of home-going students had almost dried up. Then, just as he was reaching into his pocket for his car-keys, he saw a lone figure biking down School Street toward him.

The boy was riding slowly, seeming almost to trudge over the handlebars, and his head was bent so low Alan couldn’t see his face.

But he could see what was in the carrier basket of the boy’s bike: a Playmate cooler.

“Do you understand?” Gaunt asked Polly, who was now holding the envelope.

“Yes, I… I understand. I do.” But her dreaming face was troubled.

“You don’t look happy.”

“Well… I…”

“Things like the azka don’t always work very well for people who aren’t happy,” Mr. Gaunt said. He pointed at the tiny bulge where the silver ball lay against her skin, and again she seemed to feel something shift strangely inside. At the same moment, horrible cramps of pain invaded her hands, spreading like a network of cruel steel hooks. Polly moaned loudly.

11

Mr. Gaunt crooked the finger he had pointed in a come-along gesture. She felt that shift in the silver ball again, more clearly this time, and the pain was gone.

“You don’t want to go back to the way things were, do you, Polly?” Mr. Gaunt asked in a silky voice. “No!” she cried. Her breast was moving rapidly up and down. Her hands began to make frantic washing gestures, one against the other, and her wide eyes never left his. “Please, no!”

“Because things could go from bad to worse, couldn’t they?”

“Yes! Yes, they could!”

“And nobody understands, do they? Not even the Sheriff. He doesn’t know what it’s like to wake up at two in the morning with hell in his hands, does he?” She shook her head and began to weep. “Do as I say and you’ll never have to wake up that way again,

Polly. And here is something else@o as I say and if anyone in Castle Rock finds out that your child burned to death in a San Francisco tenement, they won’t find it out from me.”

Polly uttered a hoarse, lost cry-the cry of a woman hopelessly ensnarled in a grinding nightmare. Mr. Gaunt smiled. “There are more kinds of hell than one, aren’t there, Polly?”

“How do you know about him?” she whispered. “No one knows. Not even Alan. I told Alan-”

“I know because knowing.is my business. And suspicion is his, Polly-Alan never believed what you told him.”

“He said-”

“I’m sure he said all kinds of things, but he never believed you. The woman you hired to baby-sit was a drug addict, wasn’t she? That wasn’t your fault, but of course the things which led to that situation were all a matter of personal choice, Polly, weren’t they? Your choice. The young woman you hired to watch Kelton passed out and dropped a cigarette-or maybe it was a joint-into a wastebasket.

Hers was the finger that pulled the trigger, you might say, but the gun was loaded because of your pride, your inability to bend your neck before your parents and the other good people of Castle Rock.”

Polly was sobbing harder now.

“Yet is a young woman not entitled to her pride?” Mr. Gaunt asked gently. “When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?”

Polly raised her streaming, defiant face. “I thought it was my business,” she said. “I still do. If that’s pride, so what?”

“Yes,” he said soothingly. “Spoken like a champion… butthey would have taken you back, wouldn’t they? Your mother and father?

It might not have been pleasant-not with the child always there to remind them, not with the way tongues wag in pleasant little backwaters like this one-but it would have been possible.”

“Yes, and I would have spent every day trying to stay out from under my mother’s thumb!” she burst out in a furious, ugly voice which bore almost no resemblance to her normal tone.

“Yes,” Mr. Gaunt said in that same soothing voice. “So you stayed where you were. You had Kelton, and you had your pride. And when Kelton was dead, you still had your pride… didn’t you?”

Polly screamed in grief and agony and buried her wet face in her hands.

“It hurts worse than your hands, doesn’t it?” Mr. Gaunt asked.

Polly nodded her head without taking her face out of her hands.

Mr. Gaunt put his own ugly, long-fingered hands behind his head and spoke in the tone of one who gives a eulogy: “Humanity! So noble!

So willing to sacrifice the other fellow!”

“Stop!” she moaned. “Can’t you stop?”

“It’s a secret thing, isn’t it, Patricia?”

“Yes.”

He touched her forehead. Polly uttered a gagging moan but did not draw away.

“That’s one door into hell you’d like to keep locked, isn’t it?”

She nodded inside her hands.

“Then do as I say, Polly,” he whispered. He took one of her hands away from her face and began caressing it. “Do as I say, and keep your mouth shut.” He looked closely at her wet cheeks and her streaming, reddened eyes. A little look of disgust puckered his lips for a moment.

“I don’t know which makes me sicker-a crying woman or a laughing man. Wipe your goddamned face, Polly.”

Slowly, dreamily, she took a lace-edged handkerchief from her purse and began to do it.

“That’s good,” he said, and rose. “I’ll let you go home now, Polly; you have things to do. But I want you to know it has been a great pleasure doing business with you. I have always so enjoyed ladies who take pride in themselves.”

12

“Hey, Brian-want to see a trick?”

The boy on the bicycle looked up fast, the hair flying off his forehead, and Alan saw an unmistakable expression on his face: naked, unadulterated fear.

“Trick?” the boy said in a trembling voice. “What trick?”

Alan didn’t know what the boy was afraid of, but he understood one thing-his magic, which he had relied upon often as an icebreaker with children, had for some reason been exactly the wrong thing this time.

Best to get it out of the way as soon as possible and start over again.

He held up his left arm-the one with the watch on it-and smiled into Brian Rusk’s pale, watchful, frightened face. “You’ll notice that there’s nothing up my sleeve and that my arm goes all the way up to my shoulder. But now… presto!”

Alan passed his open right hand slowly down his left arm, snapping the little packet effortlessly out from beneath his watch with his right thumb as he did so. As he closed his fist, he slipped the almost microscopic loop that held the packet closed. He clasped his left hand over his right, and when he spread them apart, a large tissue-paper bouquet of unlikely flowers bloomed where there had been nothing but thin air a moment before.

Alan had done this trick hundreds of times and never better than on this hot October afternoon, but the expected reaction-a moment of stunned surprise followed by a grin that was one part amazement and two parts admiration@idn’t dawn on Brian’s face.

He gave the bouquet a cursory glance (there seemed to be relief in that brief look, as if he had expected the trick to be of a far less pleasant nature) and then returned his gaze to Alan’s face.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Alan asked. He stretched his lips in a big smile that felt every bit as genuine as his grand father’s dentures.

“Yeah,” Brian said.

“Uh-huh. I can see you’re blown away.” Alan brought his hands together, deftly collapsing the bouquet again. It was easy-too easy, really. It was time to buy a new copy of the Folding Flower Trick; they only lasted so long. The tiny spring in this one was getting loose and the brightly colored paper would soon begin to rip.

He opened his hands again, smiling rather more hopefully now.

The ’ bouquet was gone; was once more just a small packet of paper under his watchband. Brian Rusk did not return his smile; his face wore no real expression at all. The remnants of his summer tan could not cover the pallor beneath, nor the fact that his complexion was in an unusual state of pre-pubescent revolt: a scatter of pimples on the forehead, a bigger one by the corner of his mouth, blackheads nesting on either side of his nose. There were purplish shadows under his eyes, as if his last good night’s sleep had been a long time ago.

This kid is a long way from right, Alan thought. There’s something badly sprained, maybe even broken here. There seemed to be two likely possibilities: either Brian Rusk had seen whoever had vandalized the jerzyck house, or he had done it himself. It was paydirt either way, but if it was the second choice, Alan could barely imagine the size and weight of the guilt which must now be harrowing this boy.

“That’s a great trick, Sheriff Pangborn,” Brian said in a colorless, emotionless voice. “Really.”

“Thanks-glad you liked it. Do you know what I want to talk to you about, Brian?”

“I… guess I do,” Brian said, and Alan was suddenly sure the boy was going to confess to breaking the windows. Right here on this street-corner he was going to confess, and Alan was going to take a giant step toward unravelling what had happened between Nettle and Wilma.

But Brian said nothing more. He only looked up at Alan with his tired, slightly bloodshot eyes.

“What happened, son?” Alan asked in the same quiet voice.

“What happened while you were at the jerzycks’ house?”

“Don’t know,” Bran said. His voice was listless. “But I dreamed about it last night. Sunday night, too. I dream about going to that house, only in my dream I see what’s really making all the noise.”

“And what’s that, Brian?”

“A monster,” Brian said. His voice did not change, but a large tear had appeared in each of his eyes, growing on the lower arcs of the lids. “In my dream I knock on the door instead of riding away like I did and the door opens and it’s a monster and it eats… me… up.”

The tears brimmed, then rolled slowly down the disturbed skin of Brian Rusk’s cheeks.

And yes, Alan thought, it could be that, too-simple fright. The sort of fright a little kid might feel when he opens the bedroom door at the wrong time and sees his mother and father screwing.

Only because he’s too young to know the look of screwing, he thinks they’re fighting. Maybe he even thinks, if they’re making a lot of noise, that they’re trying to kill each other.

ButBut it didn’t feel right. It was just that simple. It felt as if this kid were lying his head off, in spite of the haggard look in his eyes, the look that said I want to tell you everything. What did that mean?

Alan didn’t know for sure, but experience taught him that the likeliest solution was that Brian knew whoever had thrown the rocks.

Maybe it was someone Brian felt obliged to protect. Or maybe the rock-thrower knew Brian had seen him, and Brian knew that. Maybe the kid was afraid of reprisals.

“A person threw a bunch of rocks into the jerzycks’ house,” Alan said in a low and (he hoped) soothing voice.

“Yes, sir,” Brian said-almost sighed. “I guess so. I guess it could have been that. I thought they were fighting, but it could have been someone throwing rocks. Crash, boom, bang.”

The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang, Alan thought but did not say. “You thought they were fighting?”

“Yes, sir.”

4 1is that what you really thought?”

“Yes, sir.”

Alan sighed. “Well, you know what it was now. And you know it was a bad thing to do. Throwing rocks through somebody’s windows is a pretty serious business, even if nothing else comes of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But this time, something else did come of it. You know that, don’t you, Brian?”

“Yes, sir.”

Those eyes, looking up at him from that calm, pallid face. Alan began to understand two things: this boy did want to tell him what had happened, but he was almost certainly not going to do so.

“You look very unhappy, Brian.”

“Yes, sir?”

“’Yes, sir’. does that mean you are unhappy?”

Brian nodded, and two more tears spilled from his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Alan felt two strong, conflicting emotions: deep pity and wild exasperation.

“What are you unhappy about, Brian? Tell me.”

“I used to have this really nice dream,” Brian said in a voice which was almost too low to hear. “It was stupid, but it was nice, just the same. It was about Miss Ratcliffe, my speech teacher. Now I know it’s stupid. I didn’t used to know, and that was better. But guess what? I know more than that now.”

Those dark, terribly unhappy eyes rose to meet Alan’s again.

“The dream I have… the one about the monster who throws the rocks… it scares me, Sheriff Pangborn… but what makes me unhappy are the things I know now. It’s like knowing how the magician does his tricks.”

He nodded his head a little, and Alan could have sworn Brian was looking at the band of his watch.

“Sometimes it’s better to be dumb. I know that now.”

Alan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Brian, let’s cut through the bullshit, all right? Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw and what you did.”

“I came to see if they wanted their driveway shovelled this winter,” the boy said in a mechanical rote voice that frightened Alan badly. The kid looked like almost any American child of eleven or twelve-Converse sneakers, jeans, a tee-shirt with Bart Simpson on it-but he sounded like a robot which has been badly programmed and is now in danger of overloading. For the first time, Alan wondered if Brian Rusk had maybe seen one of his own parents throwing rocks at the jerzyck house.

“I heard noises,” the boy was continuing. He spoke in simple declarative sentences, talking as police detectives are trained to talk in court. “They were scary noises. Bangs and crashes and things breaking. So I rode away as fast as I could. The lady from next door was out on her stoop. She asked me what was going on. I think she was scared, too.”

“Yes,” Alan said. “Jillian Mislaburski. I talked to her.” He touched the Playmate cooler sitting crookedly in the basket of Brian’s bike. He was not unaware of the way Brian’s lips tightened when he did this. “Did you have this cooler with you on Sunday morning, Brian?”

“Yes, sir,” Brian said. He wiped his cheeks with the backs of his hands and watched Alan’s face warily.

“What was in it?”

Brian said nothing, but Alan thought his lips were trembling.

“What was in it, Brian?”

Brian said a little more nothing.

“Was it full of rocks?”

Slowly and deliberately, Brian shook his head-no.

For the third time, Alan asked: “What was in it?”

“Same thing that’s in it now,” Brian whispered.

“May I open it and see?”

“Yes, sir,” Brian said in his listless voice. “I guess so.”

Alan rotated the cover to one side and looked into the cooler.

It was full of baseball cards: Topps, Fleer, Donruss.

“These are my traders. I carry them with me almost everywhere,” Brian said.

“You… carry them with you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why, Brian? Why do you cart a cooler filled with baseball cards around with you?”

“I told you-they’re traders. You never know when you’ll get a chance to make a boss trade with someone. I’m still looking for a Joe Foy-he was on the Impossible Dream team in ’67-and a Mike Greenwell rookie card. The Gator’s my favorite player.” And now Alan thought he saw a faint, fugitive gleam of amusement in the boy’s eyes; could almost hear a telepathic voice chanting Fooled ya! Fooledya! But surely that was only him; only his own frustration mocking the boy’s voice.

Wasn’t it?

Well, what did you expect to find inside that cooler, anyway?

A pile of rocks with notes tied around them? Did you actually think he was on his way to do the same thing to someone else’s house?

Yes, he admitted. Part of him had thought exactly that. Brian Rusk, The Pint-Sized Terror of Castle Rock. The Mad Rocker. And the worst part was this: he was pretty sure Brian Rusk knew what was going through his head.

Fooledya! Fooledya, Sheriff.’ “Brian, please tell me what’s going on around here. If you know, please tell me.”

Brian closed the lid of the Playmate cooler and said nothing. It made a soft little snick! in the drowsy autumn afternoon.

“Can’t say?”

Brian nodded slowly-meaning, Alan thought, that he was right: he couldn’t say.

“Tell me this, at least: are you scared? Are you scared, Brian?”

Brian nodded again, just as slowly.

“Tell me what you’re scared of, son. Maybe I can make it go away.” He tapped one finger lightly against the badge he wore on the left side of his uniform shirt. “I think that’s why they pay me to lug this star around. Because sometimes I can make the scary stuff go away.”

“I-” Brian began, and then the police radio Alan had installed beneath the dash of the Town and Country wagon three or four years ago squawked to life.

“Unit One, Unit One, this is base. Do you copy? Over?”

Brian’s eyes broke away from Alan’s. They turned toward the station wagon and the sound of Sheila Brigham’s voice-the voice of authority, the voice of the police. Alan saw that, if the boy had been on the verge of telling him something (and it might only be wishful thinking to believe he had been), he wasn’t anymore. His face had closed up like a clamshell.

“You go on home now, Brian. We’re going to talk about this… this dream of yours… more later on. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Brian said. “I guess so.”

“In the meantime, think about what I said: most of what being Sheriff’s about is making the scary stuff go away.”

“I have to go home now, Sheriff. If I don’t get home pretty soon, my mom’s gonna be mad at me.”

Alan nodded. “Well, we don’t want that. Go on, Brian.”

He watched the boy go. Brian’s head was down, and once again he did not seem to be riding the bike so much as trudging along with it between his legs. Something was wrong there, so wrong that Alan’s finding out what had happened to Wilma and Nettle seemed secondary to finding out what had put the tired, haunted expression on that kid’s face.

The women, after all, were dead and buried. Brian Rusk was still alive.

He went to the tired old station wagon he should have traded a year ago, leaned in, grabbed the Radio Shack mike, and depressed the transmit button. “Yeah, Sheila, this is Unit One. I copy-come on back.”

“Henry Payton called for you, Alan,” Sheila said. “He told me to tell you it’s urgent. He wants me to patch you through to him.

Ten-four?”

“Go for it,” Alan said. He felt his pulse pick up.

“It may take a couple of minutes, ten-four?”

“That’s fine. I’ll be right here. Unit One clear.”

He leaned against the side of the car in the dappled shade, mike in hand, waiting to see what was urgent in Henry Payton’s life.

13

By the time Polly reached home, it was twenty minutes past three, and she felt torn in two completely different directions. On one hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to be about the errand Mr.

Gaunt had given her (she didn’t like to think of it in his terms, as a prank-Polly Chalmers was not much of a prankster), to get it done so that the azka would finally belong to her. The concept that the dealing wasn’t done until Mr. Gaunt said the dealing was done had not so much as crossed her mind.

On the other hand, she felt a deep, drumming need to get in touch with Alan, to tell him exactly what had happened… or as much of it as she could remember. One thing she could rememberit filled her with shame and a low sort of horror, but she could remember it, all right-was this: Mr. Leland Gaunt hated the man Polly loved, and Mr.

Gaunt was doing something-something-that was very wrong. Alan should know. Even if the azka stopped working, he should know.

You don’t mean that.

But yes-part of her meant exactly that. The part that was terrified of Leland Gaunt even though she couldn’t remember what, exactly, he had done to induce that feeling of terror.

Do you want to go back to the way things were, Polly? Do you want to go back to owning a pair of hands that feel full of shrapnel?

No… but neither did she want Alan hurt. Neither did she want Mr. Gaunt to do whatever he was planning to do, if it was something (she suspected it was) that would hurt the town. Nor did she want to be a part of that something, by going out to the old deserted Camber place at the end of Town Road #3 and playing some sort of trick she didn’t even understand.

So these conflicting wants, each championed by its own hectoring voice, pulled at her as she walked slowly home. If Mr. Gaunt had hypnotized her in some way (she had been positive of this when she left the store, but she became less and less sure as time passed), the effects had worn off now. (Polly really believed this.) And she had never in her life found herself so incapable of deciding what to do next. It was as if her whole supply of some vital decisionmaking chemical had been stolen from her brain.

In the end she went home to do what Mr. Gaunt had advised (although she no longer precisely remembered the advice). She would check her mail, and then she would call Alan and tell him what Mr. Gaunt wanted her to do.

If you do that, the interior voice said grimly, the azka really will stop working. And you know it.

Yes-but there was still the question of right and wrong. There was still that. She would call Alan, and apologize for being so short with him, and then tell him what Mr. Gaunt wanted of her. Perhaps she would even give him the envelope Mr. Gaunt had given her, the one she was supposed to put in the tin can.

Perhaps.

Feeling a little better, Polly put her key in the front door of her house-again rejoicing at the ease of this operation, almost without being aware of it-and turned it. The mail was in its usual place on the carpet-not very much today. Usually there was more junk mail after the Post Office had taken a day off. She bent and picked it up. A cable-TV brochure with Tom Cruise’s smiling, impossibly handsome face on the front; one catalogue from the Horchow Collection and another from The Sharper Image. AlsoPolly saw the one letter and a ball of dread began to grow deep in her stomach. To Patricia Chalmers of Castle Rock, from the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare… from 666 Geary. She remembered 666 Geary so very well from her trips down there.

Three trips in all, Three interviews with three Aid to Dependent Children bureaucrats, two of whom had been men-men who had looked at her the way you looked at a candy-wrapper that’s gotten stuck on one of your best shoes. The third bureaucrat had been an extremely large black woman, a woman who had known how to listen and how to laugh, and it was from this woman that Polly had finally gotten an approval. But she remembered 666 Geary, second floor, so very, very well. She remembered the way the light from the big window at the end of the hall had laid a long, milky stain on the linoleum; she remembered the echoey sound of typewriters from offices where the doors always stood open; she remembered the cluster of men smoking cigarettes by the sand-filled urn at the far end of the hall, and how they had looked at her. Most of all she remembered how it had felt to be dressed in her one good outfita dark polyester pants suit, a white silk blouse, L’Eggs Nearly Nude pantyhose, her low heels-and how terrified and lonely she had felt, for the dim second-floor corridor of 666 Geary seemed to be a place with neither heart nor soul. Her A.D.C application had finally been approved there, but it was the turndowns she remembered, of course-the eyes of the men, how they had crawled across her breasts (they were better dressed than Norville down at the diner, but otherwise, she thought, not really much different); the mouths of the men, how they had pursed in decorous disapproval as they considered the problem of Kelton Chalmers, the bastard offspring of this little trollop, this janey-come-lately who didn’t look like a hippie now, oh no, but who would undoubtedly take off her silk blouse and nice pants suit as soon as she got out of here, not to mention her brassiere, and put on a pair of tight bellbottom jeans and a tie-dyed blouse that would showcase her nipples. Their eyes said all that and more, and although the response of the Department had come in the mail, Polly had known immediately that she would be turned down. She had wept as she left the building on each of those first two occasions, and it seemed to her now that she could remember the acid-trickle of each tear as it slid down her cheek.

That, and the way the people on the street had looked at her. No caring in their eyes; just a certain dull curiosity.

She had never wanted to think about those times or that dim second-floor hallway again, but now it was back with her-so clearly she could smell the floor polish, could see the milky reflected light from the big window, could hear the echoey, dreamy sound of old manual typewriters chewing through another day in the bowels of the bureaucracy.

What did they want? Dear God, what could the people at 666

Geary want with her at this late date?

Tear it up! a voice inside nearly screamed, and the command was so imperative that she came very close to doing just that. She ripped the envelope open instead. There was a single sheet of paper inside.

It was a Xerox. And although the envelope had been addressed to her, she saw with astonishment that the letter was not; it was addressed to Sheriff Alan Pangborn.

Her eyes dropped to the foot of the letter. The name typed below the scrawled signature was John L. Perlmutter, and this name rang a very faint bell for her. Her eyes dropped a little further and she saw, at the very foot of the letter, the notation “cc: Patricia Chalmers.” Well, this was a Xerox, not a carbon, but it still cleared up the puzzling matter of this being Alan’s letter (and settled her first confused idea that it had been delivered to her by mistake).

But what, in God’s name…

Polly sat on the Shaker bench in the hallway and began to read the letter. As she did so, a remarkable series of emotions lensed across her face, like cloud formations on an unsettled, windy day: puzzlement, understanding, shame, horror, anger, and finally fury.

She screamed aloud once “No!"-and then went back and forced herself to read the letter again, slowly, all the way to the end.

San Francisco Department of Child Welfare 666 Geary Street San Francisco, California 94112

September 23, 1991

Sheriff Alan J. Pangborn Castle County Sheriff’s Office 2 The Municipal Building Castle Rock, Maine 04055

Dear Sheriff Pangborn:

I am in receipt of your letter of September 1, and am writing to tell you I can offer you no help whatever in this matter. It is the policy of this Department to give out information on applicants for Aid to Dependent Children (A.D.C) only when we are compelled to do so by a valid court order. I have shown your letter to Martin D. Chung, our chief legal counsel, who instructs me to tell you that a copy of your letter has been forwarded to the California Attorney General’s Office.

Mr. Chung has asked for an opinion as to whether your request may be illegal in and of itself. Whatever the result of that inquiry, I must tell you that I find your curiosity about this woman’s life in San Francisco to be both inappropriate and offensive.

I suggest, Sheriff Pangborn, that you lay this matter to rest before you incur legal difficulties.

Sincerely, John L. Perlmutter Deputy Director cc: Patricia Chalmers After her fourth reading of this terrible letter, Polly rose from the bench and walked into the kitchen. She walked slowly and gracefully, more like one who swims than one who walks. At first her eyes were dazed and confused, but by the time she had taken the handset from the wall-mounted phone and tapped out the number of the Sheriff’s Office on the oversized pads, they had cleared.

The look which lit them was simple and unmistakable: an anger so strong it was nearly hate.

Her lover had been sniffing around in her past-she found the idea simultaneously unbelievable and strangely, hideously plausible.

She had done a lot of comparing herself to Alan Pangborn in the last four or five months, and that meant she had done a lot of coming off second best. His tears; her deceptive calm, which hid so much shame and hurt and secret defiant pride. His honesty; her little stack of lies. How saintlike he had seemed! How dauntingly perfect!

How hypocritical her own insistence that he put the past away!

And all the time he had been sniffing around, trying to find out the real story on Kelton Chalmers.

“You bastard,” she whispered, and as the telephone began to ring, the knuckles of the hand holding the telephone turned white with strain.

14

Lester Pratt usually left Castle Rock High in the company of several friends; they would all go down to Hemphill’s Market for sodas, then head off to someone’s house or apartment for a couple of hours to sing hymns or play games or just shoot the bull. Today, however, Lester left school alone with his knapsack on his back (he disdained the traditional teacher’s briefcase) and his head down. If Alan had been there to watch Lester walk slowly across the school lawn toward the faculty parking lot, he would have been struck by the man’s resemblance to Brian Rusk.

Three times that day Lester had tried to get in touch with Sally, to find out what in the land of Goshen had made her so mad. The last time had been during his period five lunch-break. He knew she was at the Middle School, but the closest he got to her was a callback from Mona Lawless, who taught sixth- and seventh-grade math and chummed with Sally.

“She can’t come to the phone,” Mona told him, displaying all the warmth of a deep-freeze stuffed with Popsicles.

“Why not?” he had asked-almost whined. “Come on, Monagive!

“I don’t know.” Mona’s tone had progressed from Popsicies in the deep-freeze to the verbal equivalent of liquid nitrogen. “All I know is that she’s been staying with Irene Lutjens, she looks like she spent all last night crying, and she says she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

And this is all your fault, Mona’s frozen tone said. I know that because you’re a man and all men are dogshit-this is just another specific example illustrating the general case.

“Well I don’t have the slightest idea what it’s all about!”

Lester shouted. “Will you tell her that, at least? Tell her I don’t know why she’s mad at me! Tell her whatever it is, it must be a misunderstanding, because I don’t get it!”

There was a long pause. When Mona spoke again, her voice had warmed up a little. Not much, but it was a lot better than liquid nitrogen. “All right, Lester. I’ll tell her.”

Now he raised his head, half-hoping Sally might be sitting in the passenger seat of the Mustang, ready to kiss and make up, but the car was empty. The only person close to it was soft-headed Slopey Dodd, goofing around on his skateboard.

Steve Edwards came up behind Lester and clapped him on the shoulder. “Les, boy! Want to come over to my place for a Coke?

A bunch of the guys said they’d drop by. We have to talk about this outrageous Catholic harassment. The big meeting’s at the church tonight, don’t forget, and it would be good if we Y.A.’s could present a united front when it comes to deciding what to do.

I mentioned the idea to Don Hemphill and he said yeah, great, go for it.” He looked at Lester as if he expected a pat on the head.

“I can’t this afternoon, Steve. Maybe another time.”

“Hey, Les, don’t you get it? There may not be another time!

The Pope’s boys aren’t fooling around anymore!”

“I can’t come over,” Les said. And if you’re wise, his face said, you’ll stop pushing it.

“Well, but… why not?”

Because I have to find out what the heck I did to make my girl so angry, Lester thought. And I am going to find out, even if I have to shake it out of her.

Out loud he said, “I’ve got stuff to do, Steve. Important stuff.

Take my word for it.”

“If this is about Sally, Les-” Lester’s eyes flashed dangerously.

“You just shut up about Sally.”

Steve, an inoffensive young man who had been set aflame by the strife over Casino Nite, was not yet burning brightly enough to overstep the line Lester Pratt had so clearly drawn. But neither was he quite ready to give up. Without Lester Pratt, a Young Adults’ Policy Meeting was a joke, no matter how many from the Y.A. group turned out. Pitching his voice more reasonably, he said: “You know the anonymous card Bill got?”

“Yes,” Lester said. Rev. Rose had found it on the floor of the parsonage front hallway: the already-notorious “Babtist Rat-Fuck” card.

The Reverend had passed it around at a hastily called Guys Only

Y.A. meeting because, he said, it was impossible to credit unless you saw the vile thing for yourself. It was hard to fully understand, Rev.

Rose had added, the depths to which the Catholics would sink-uh in order to stifle righteous opposition to their Sataninspired night of gambling; perhaps actually seeing this vile spew of filth would help these “fine young men” comprehend what they were up against. “For do we not say that forewarned is-uh forearmed?” Rev. Rose had finished grandly. He then produced the card (it was inside a Baggie, as if those who handled it needed to be guarded from Infection) and handed it around.

As Lester finished reading it, he had been more than ready to ring a few sets of Catholic chimes, but now the entire affair seemed distant and somehow childish. Who really cared if the Catholics gambled for play money and gave away a few new tires and kitchen appliances? When it came down to a choice between the Catholics and “Sally Ratcliffe, Lester knew which one he had to worry about-a meeting to try and work out the next step!” Steve was continuing. He was starting to get hot again. “We have to seize the initiative here, Les… we have to! Reverend Bill says he’s worried that these so-called Concerned Catholic Men are through talking.

Their next step may be-”

“Look, Steve, do whatever you want, but leave me out of i’t!”

Steve stopped and stared at him, clearly shocked and just as clearly expecting Lester, normally the most even-tempered of fellows, to come to his senses and apologize. When he realized no apology was forthcoming, he started to walk back toward the school, putting distance between himself and Lester. “Boy, you’re in a rotten mood,” he said.

“That’s right!” Lester called back truculently. He rolled his big hands into fists and planted them on his hips.

But Lester was more than just angry; he hurt, damn it, he hurt all over, and what hurt the worst was his mind, and he wanted to strike out at someone. Not poor old Steve Edwards; it was just that allowing himself to get passed at Steve seemed to have turned on a switch inside him. That switch had sent electricity flowing to a lot of mental appliances which were usually dark and silent. For the first time since he’d fallen in love with Sally, Lester-normally the most placid of men-felt angry at her, too. What right had she to tell him to go to hell? What right did she have to call him a bastard?

She was mad about something, was she? All right, she was mad.

Maybe he had even given her something to be mad about. He hadn’t the slightest idea what that something might be, but say (just for the sake of argument) that he had. Did that give her the right to fly off the handle at him without even doing him the courtesy of asking for an explanation first? Did it give her the right to stay with Irene Lut’ens so he couldn’t crash his way into wherever she was, or to refuse all his telephone calls, or to employ Mona Lawless as a go-between?

I’m going to find her, Lester thought, and I’m going to find out what’s eating her. Then, once it’s out, we can make up. And after we do, I’m going to give her the same lecture I give my freshmen when basketball practice starts-about how trust is the key to teamwork.

He stripped off his pack, chucked it into the back seat, and climbed into his car. As he did, he saw something sticking out from under the passenger seat. Something black. It looked like a wallet.

Lester seized it eagerly, thinking at first that it must be Sally’s.

If she had left it in his car at some point during the long holiday weekend, she must have missed it by now. She’d be anxious.

And if he could relieve her anxiety about her lost wallet, the rest of their conversation might become a little easier.

But it wasn’t Sally’s; he saw that as soon as he got a close look at the item which had been under the passenger seat. It was black leather. Sally’s was scuffed blue suede, and much smaller.

Curiously, he opened it. The first thing he saw struck him like a hard blow to the solar plexus. It was John LaPointe’s Sheriff’s Department ID.

What in the name of God had John LaPointe been doing in his car?

Sally had it all weekend, his mind whispered. So just what the hell do you think he was doing in your car?

“No,” he said. “Uh-uh, no way-she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t see him. No way in hell.”

But she had seen him. She and Deputy John LaPointe had gone out together for over a year, in spite of the developing bad feelings between Castle Rock’s Catholics and Baptists. They had broken up before the current hooraw over Casino Nite, butLester got out of the car again and flipped through the wallet’s see-through pockets. His sense of incredulity grew. Here was LaPointe’s driver’s license-in the picture on it, he was wearing the little moustache he’d cultivated when, he’d been going out with Sally.

Lester knew what some fellows called moustaches like that: pussyticklers. Here was John LaPointe’s fishing license. Here was a picture of John LaPointe’s mother and father. Here was his hunting license. And here… here…

Lester stared fixedly at the snapshot he’d come upon. It was a snapshot of John and Sally. A snap of a fellow and his best girl.

They were standing in front of what looked like a carnival shootinggallery. They were looking at each other and laughing. Sally was holding a big stuffed teddy bear. LaPointe had probably just won it for her.

Lester stared at the picture. A vein had risen in the center of his forehead, quite a prominent one, and it pulsed steadily.

What had she called him? A cheating bastard?

“Well, look who’s talking,” Lester Pratt whispered.

Rage began to build up in him. It happened very quickly. And when someone touched him on the shoulder he swung around, dropping the wallet and doubling up his fists. He came very close to punching inoffensive, stuttering Slopey ’dodd into the middle of next week.

“Cub-Coach P-Pratt?” Slopey asked. His eyes were big and round, but he didn’t look frightened. Interested, but not frightened.

“Are yuh-yuh-you o-k-k-kay?”

“I’m fine,” Lester said thickly. “Go home, Slopey. You don’t have any business with that skateboard in the faculty parking lot.”

He bent down to pick up the dropped wallet, but Slopey was two feet closer to the ground and beat him to it. He looked curiously at LaPointe’s driver’s-license photo before handing the wallet back to Coach Pratt. “Yep,” Slopey said. “That’s the same guh-guh-guy, all r-right.”

He hopped onto his board and prepared to ride away. Lester grabbed him by the shirt before he could do so. The board squirted out from under Slopey’s foot, rolled away on its own, hit a pothole and turned over. Slopey’s AC/DC shirt-FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK, WE SALUTE You, it said-tore at the neck, but Slopey didn’t seem to mind; didn’t even seem to be much surprised by Lester’s actions, let alone frightened. Lester didn’t notice. Lester was beyond noticing nuances.

He was one of those large and normally placid men who own a short, nasty temper beneath that placidity, a damaging emotional tornado-in-waiting. Some men go through their entire lives without ever discovering that ugly stormcenter. Lester, however, had discovered his (or rather it had discovered him) and he was now completely in its grip.

Holding a swatch of Slopey’s tee-shirt in a fist which was nearly the size of a Daisy canned ham, he bent his sweating face down to Slopey’s. The vein in the center of his forehead was pulsing faster than ever.

“What do you mean, ’that’s the same guy, all right’?”

“He’s the same g-g-guy who muh-met M-Miss Rub-Rub-Ratclime after school last Fuh-Friday.”

“He met her after school?” Lester asked hoarsely. He gave Slopey a shake brisk enough to rattle the boy’s teeth in his head. “Are you sure of that?”

“Yeah,” Slopey said. “They w-went off in your cub-cub-bar, Coach P-Pratt. The guh-guy was d-d-driving.”

“Driving? He was driving my car?john LaPointe was driving my car with Sally in it?”

“Well, that g-g-guy,” Slopey said, pointing at the driver’s-license photograph again. “B-But before they g-g-got ih-in, he g-gave her a kuh-kuh-kiss.”

“Did he,” Lester said. His face had become very still. “Did he, now.

“Oh, shuh-shuh-shore,” Slopey said. A wide (and rather salacious) grin lit his face.

In a soft, silky tone utterly unlike his usual rough hey-guyslet’s-go-get-em voice, Lester asked: “And did she kiss him back?

What do you think, Slopey?”

Slopey rolled his eyes happily. “I’ll sub-say she d-d-did! They were r-really sub-sub-huckin face, C-Coach Pub-Pratt!”

“Sucking face,” Lester mused in his new soft and silky voice.

“Yep.”

“Really sucking face,” Lester marvelled in his new soft and silky voice.

“You b-b-bet.”

Lester let go of the Slopester (as his few friends called him) and straightened up. The vein in the center of his forehead was pulsing and pumping away. He had begun to grin. It was an unpleasant grin, exposing what seemed like a great many more white, square teeth than a normal man should have. His blue eyes had become small, squinty triangles. His crewcut screamed off his head in all directions.

“Cub-Cub-Coach Pratt?” Slopey asked. “Is something rub-ruhhong?”

“Nope,” Lester Pratt said in his new soft and silky voice. His grin never wavered. “Nothing I can’t put right.” In his mind, his hands were already locked around the neck of that lying, Popeloving, teddy-bear-winning, girl-stealing, shit-eating French frog of a John LaPointe. The asshole that walked like a man. The asshole who had apparently taught the girl Lester loved, the girl who would do no more than part her lips the tiniest bit when Lester kissed her, how to really suck face.

First he would take care of John LaPointe. No problem there.

Once that was done, he’d have to talk to Sally.

Or something.

“Not a thing in the world I can’t put right,” he repeated in his new soft and silky voice, and slid back behind the Mustang’s wheel.

The car leaned appreciably to the left as Lester’s two hundred and twenty pounds of solid hock and loin settled into the bucket seat.

He started the engine, gunned it in a series of hungry tiger-cage roars, then drove away in a screech of rubber. The Slopester, coughing and theatrically waving dust away from his face, walked over to where his skateboard lay.

The neck of his old tee-shirt had been torn completely away from the shirt’s body, leaving what looked like a round black necklace lying over Slopey’s prominent collarbones. He was grinning. He had done just what Mr. Gaunt had asked him to do, and it had gone like gangbusters. Coach Pratt had looked madder than a wet hen.

Now he could go home and look at his teapot.

“I j-j-just wish I didn’t have to stub-stub-butter,” he remarked to no one in particular.

Slopey mounted his skateboard and rode away.

15

Sheila had a hard time connecting Alan with Henry Payton-once she was positive she’d lost Henry, who sounded really excited, and would have to call him back-and she had no more than accomplished this technological feat when Alan’s personal line lit up.

Sheila put aside the cigarette she’d been about to light and answered it. “Castle County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Pangborn’s line.”

“Hello, Sheila. I want to talk to Alan.”

“Polly?” Sheila frowned. She was sure that was who it was, but she had never heard Polly Chalmers sound exactly as she did nowcold and clipped, like an executive secretary in a big company. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Polly said. “I want to talk to Alan.”

“Gee, Polly, you can’t. He’s talking with Henry Payton right n-”

“Put me on hold,” Polly interrupted. “I’ll wait.”

Sheila began to feel flustered. “Well… uh… I would, but it’s a little more complicated than that. You see, Alan’s… you know, in the field. I had to patch Henry through.”

“If you can patch Henry Payton through, you can patch me through,” Polly said coldly. “Right?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t know how long they’ll be “I don’t care if they talk until hell freezes over,” Polly said. “Put me on hold, and when they’re done, patch me through to Alan. I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it weren’t important-you know that, Sheila, don’t you?”

Yes-Sheila knew it. And she knew something else, too: Polly was beginning to scare her. “Polly, are you okay?”

There was a long pause. Then Polly answered with a question of her own. “Sheila, did you type any correspondence for Sheriff Pangborn that was addressed to the Department of Child Welfare in San Francisco?

Or see any envelopes addressed that way go out?”

Red lights-a whole series of them-suddenly went on in Sheila’s mind. She nearly idolized Alan Pangborn, and Polly Chalmers was accusing him of something. She wasn’t sure what, but she knew the tone of accusation when she heard it. She knew it very well.

“That isn’t the sort of information I could give out to anyone,” she said, and her own tone had dropped twenty degrees. “I suppose you’d better ask the Sheriff, Polly.”

“Yes-I guess I’d better. Put me on hold and connect me when you can, please.”

“Polly, what’s wrong? Are you angry at Alan? Because you must know he’d never do anything that was-”

“I don’t know anything anymore,” Polly said. “If I asked you something that was out of line, I’m sorry.

Now will you put me on hold and connect me as soon as you can, or do I have to go out and find him for myself?”

“No, I’ll connect you,” Sheila said. Her heart felt strangely troubled, as if something terrible had happened. She, like many of the women in Castle Rock, had believed Alan and Polly were deeply in love, and, like many of the other women in town, Sheila tended to see them as characters in a dark-tinged fairy-tale where everything would come right in the end… somehow love would find a way.

But now Polly sounded more than angry; she sounded full of pain, and something else as well. To Sheila, the something else sounded almost like hate. “You’re going on hold now, Polly-it may be awhile.”

“That’s fine. Thanks, Sheila.”

“Welcome.” She pushed the hold button and then found her cigarette. She lit it and dragged deeply, looking at the small flickering light with a frown.

16

“Alan?” Henry Payton called. “Alan, you there?” He sounded like an announcer broadcasting from inside a large empty Saltines box.

“Right here, Henry.”

“I got a call from the FBI just half an hour ago,” Henry said from inside his cracker-box. “We caught an incredibly lucky break on those prints.”

Alan’s heartbeat kicked into a higher gear. “The ones on the doorknob of Nettle’s house? The partials?”

“Right. We have a tentative match with a fellow right there in town. One prior-petty larceny in 1977. We’ve also got his service prints.”

“Don’t keep me hanging-who is it?”

“The name of the individual is Hugh Albert Priest.”

“Hugh Priest!” Alan exclaimed. He could not have been more surprised if Payton had named J. Danforth Quayle. To the best of Alan’s knowledge, the two men had known Nettle Cobb equally well. “Why would Hugh Priest kill Nettle’s dog? Or break Wilma Jerzyck’s windows, for that matter?”

“I don’t know the gentleman, so I can’t say,” Henry replied.

“Why don’t you pick him up and ask him? In fact, why don’t you do it right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry Hump, South Dakota?”

“Good idea,” Alan said. “I’ll talk to you later, Henry. Thanks.”

“Just keep me updated, scout-this is supposed to be my case, you know.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to you.”

There was a sharp metallic sound-bink!-as the connection broke, and then Alan’s radio was transmitting the open hum of a telephone line. Alan wondered briefly what Nynex and AT amp;T would think of the games they were playing, then bent to rack the mike. As he did so, the telephone-line hum was broken by Sheila Brigham’s voice-her uncharacteristically hesitant voice.

“Sheriff, I have Polly Chalmers on hold. She’s asked to be patched through to you as soon as you’re available. Ten-four?”

Alan blinked. “Polly?” He was suddenly afraid, the way you’re afraid when the telephone rings at three in the morning. Polly had never requested such a service before, and if asked, Alan would have said she never would-it would have gone against her idea of correct behavior, and to Polly, correct behavior was very important.

“What is it, Sheila-did she say? Ten-four.”

“No, Sheriff. Ten-four.”

No. Of course she hadn’t. He had known that, too. Polly didn’t spread her business around. The fact that he’d even asked showed how surprised he was.

“Sheriff?”

“Patch her through, Sheila. Ten-four.”

“Ten-forty, Sheriff.”

Bink!

He stood there in the sunshine, his heart beating too hard and too fast. He didn’t like this.

The bink! sound came again, followed by Sheila’s voice-distant, almost lost. “Go ahead, Polly-you should be connected.”

“Alan?” The voice was so loud he recoiled. It was the voice of a giant… an angry giant. He knew that much already; one word was enough.

“I’m here, Polly-what is it?”

For a moment there was only silence. Somewhere, deep within it, was the faint mutter of other voices on other calls. He had time to wonder if he had lost the connection… time to almost hope he had.

“Alan, I know this line is open,” she said, “but you’ll know what I’m talking about. How could you? How could you?”

Something was familiar about this conversation. Something.

“Polly, I’m not understanding you-”

“Oh, I think you are,” she replied. Her voice was growing thicker, harder to understand, and Alan realized that if she wasn’t crying, she soon would be. “It’s hard to find out you don’t know a person the way you thought you did. It’s hard to find out the face you thought you loved is only a mask.”

Something familiar, right, and now he knew what it was. This was like the nightmares he’d had following the deaths of Annie and Todd, the nightmares in which he stood on the side of the road and watched them go past in the Scout. They were on their way to die. He knew it, but he was helpless to change it. He tried to wave his arms but they were too heavy. He tried to shout and couldn’t remember how to open his mouth. They drove by him as if he were invisible, and this was like that, too-as if he had become invisible to Polly in some weird way.

“Annie-” He realized with horror whose name he had said, and backtracked. “Polly. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Polly, but-”

“You do!” she screamed at him suddenly. “Don’t say you don’t when you do! Why couldn’t you wait for me to tell you, Alan? And if you couldn’t wait, why couldn’t you ask? Why did you have to go behind my back? How could you go behind my back?”

He shut his eyes tight in an effort to catch hold of his racing, confused thoughts, but it did no good. A hideous picture came instead: Mike Horton from the Norwayjournal-Register, bent over the newspaper’s Bearcat scanner, furiously taking notes in his pidgin shorthand.

“I don’t know what it is you think I’ve done, but you’ve got it wrong. Let’s get together, talk-”

“No. I don’t think I can see you now, Alan.”

“Yes. You can. And you’re going to. I’ll bThen Henry Payton’s voice cut in. Why don’t you do i’t right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry HumP, South Dakota?

“You’ll be what?” she was asking. “You’ll be what?”

“I just remembered something,” Alan said slowly.

“Oh, did you? Was it a letter you wrote at the beginning of September, Alan? A letter to San Francisco?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Polly. I can’t come now because there’s been a break in… in the other thing. But later-” She spoke to him through a series of gasping sobs that should have made her hard to understand but didn’t. “Don’t you get it, Alan? There is no later, not anymore. You-”

“Polly, please-”

“No! just leave me alone! Leave me alone, you snooping, prying son of a bitch!”

Bink!

And suddenly Alan was listening to that open telephone line hum again. He looked around the intersection of Main and School like a man who doesn’t know where he is and has no clear understanding of how he got there. His eyes had the faraway, puzzled expression often seen in the eyes of fighters in the last few seconds before their knees come unhinged and they go sprawling to the canvas for a long winter’s nap.

How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?

He hadn’t the slightest idea. The whole town seemed to have gone slightly nuts in the last week or so… and now Polly was infected, too.

Bink!

“Urn… Sheriff?” It was Sheila, and Alan knew from her hushed, tentative tone that she’d had her ears on during at least part of his conversation with Polly. “Alan, are you there? Come back?”

He felt a sudden urge, amazingly strong, to rip the mike out of its socket and throw it into the bushes beyond the sidewalk. Then drive away. Anywhere. just stop thinking about everything and drive down the sun.

Instead he gathered all of his forces and made himself think of Hugh Priest. That’s what he had to do, because -t now looked as if maybe Hugh had brought about the deaths of two women. Hugh was his business right now, not Polly… and he discovered a great sense of relief hiding in that.

He pushed the TRANSMIT button. “Here, Sheila. Ten-four.”

“Alan, I think I lost the connection with Polly. I… um… didn’t mean to listen, but-”

“That’s okay, Sheila; we were done.”

(There was something horrible about that, but he refused to think of it now.) “Who’s there with you right now? Ten-four?”

“John’s catching,” Sheila said, obviously relieved at the turn in the conversation. “Clut’s out on patrol. Near Castle View, according to his last ten-twenty.”

“Okay.” Polly’s face, suffused with alien anger, tried to swim to the surface of his mind. He forced it back and concentrated on Hugh Priest again. But for one terrible second he could see no faces at all; only an awful blankness.

“Alan? You there? Ten-four?”

“Yes. You bet. Call Clut and tell him to get on over to Hugh Priest’s house near the end of Castle Hill Road. He’ll know where.

I imagine Hugh’s at work, but if he does happen to be taking the day off, I’ll want Clut to pick him up and bring him in for questioning. Ten-four?”

“Ten-four, Alan.”

“Tell him to proceed with extreme caution. Tell him Hugh is wanted for questioning in the deaths of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck.

He should be able to fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.

Ten-four.”

“Oh!” Sheila sounded both alarmed and excited. “Ten-four, Sheriff.”

“I’m on my way to the town motor pool. I expect to find Hugh there. Ten-forty over and out.”

As he racked the mike (it felt as if he had been holding it for at least four years) he thought: If you’d told Polly what you just put on the air to Sheila, this situation you’ve got on your hands might be a little less nasty.

Or it might not-how could he tell such a thing when he didn’t know what the situation was? Polly had accused him of prying… of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped.

Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up-and-hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.

This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead-finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettle’s dog, Raider.

For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon’s engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly’s face-not Hugh’s-he saw in his mind.