Needful Things

1

By quarter to six, a weird twilight had begun to creep over Castle Rock; thunderheads were stacking up on the southern horizon. Low, distant boomings muttered over the woods and fields from that direction. The clouds were moving toward town, growing as they came.

The streetlights, governed by a master photoelectric cell, came on a full half hour earlier than they usually did at that time of year.

Lower Main Street was a crowded confusion. It had been overrun by State Police vehicles and TV newsvans. Radio calls crackled and entwined in the hot, still air. TV technicians paid out cable and yelled at the people-kids, mostly-who tripped over the loose lengths of it before they could anchor it temporarily to the pavement with duct tape. Photographers from four daily papers stood outside the barricades in front of the Municipal Building and took stills which would appear on front pages the following day. A few localssurprisingly few, if anyone had bothered to notice such thingsrubbernecked. A TV correspondent stood in the glare of a hiintensity lamp and taped his report with the Municipal Building in the background. “A senseless wave of violence swished through Castle Rock this afternoon,” he began, then stopped. “Swished?”

he asked himself disgustedly. “Shit, let’s take it again from the top.”

To his left, a TV-dude from another station was watching his crew prepare for what would be a live feed in less than twenty minutes.

More of the onlookers had been drawn to the familiar faces of the TV correspondents than to the barricades, where there had been nothing to see since two orderlies from Medical Assistance had brought out the unfortunate Lester Pratt in a black plastic bag, loaded him into the back of their ambulance, and driven away.

Upper Main, away from the blue strobes of the State Police cruisers and the bright pools of the TV lights, was almost entirely deserted.

Almost.

Every now and then a car or a pick-up truck would park in one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. Every now and then a pedestrian would saunter up to the new shop, where the display lights were off and the shade was pulled down on the door under the canopy.

Every now and then one of the rubberneckers on Lower Main would break away from the shifting knot of onlookers and walk up the street, past the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had once stood, past You Sew and Sew, closed and dark, to the new store.

No one noticed this trickle of visitors-not the police, not the camera crews, not the correspondents, not the majority of the bystanders. They were looking at THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and their backs were turned to the place where, less than three hundred yards away, the crime was still going on.

If some disinterested observer had been keeping an eye on Needful Things, he or she would have quickly detected a pattern.

The visitors approached. The visitors saw the sign in the window which read

The visitors stepped back, identical expressions of frustration and distress on their faces-they looked like hurting junkies who had discovered the pusherman wasn’t where he’d promised to be. What do I do now? their faces said. Most stepped forward to read the sign again, as if a second, closer scrutiny would somehow change the message.

A few got into their cars and left or wandered down toward the Municipal Building to stare at the free show for awhile, looking dazed and vaguely disappointed. On the faces of most, however, an expression of sudden comprehension dawned. They had the look of people suddenly understanding some basic concept, like how to diagram simple sentences or reduce a pair of fractions to their lowest common denominator.

These people walked around the corner to the service alley which ran behind the business buildings on Main Street-the alley where Ace had parked the Tucker Talisman the night before.

Forty feet down, an oblong of yellow light fell out of an open door and across the patched concrete. This light grew slowly brighter as day slipped into evening. A shadow lay in the center of the oblong, like a silhouette cut from mourner’s crepe. The shadow belonged, of course, to Leland Gaunt.

He had placed a table in the doorway. On it was a Roi-Tan cigar box. He put the money which his customers tendered into this box and made change from it. These patrons approached hesitantly, even fearfully in some cases, but all of them had one thing in common: they were angry people with heavy grudges to tote. A few-not many-turned away before they reached Mr. Gaunt’s makeshift counter. Some went running, with the wide eyes of men and women who have glimpsed a frightful fiend licking its chops in the shadows.

Most, however, stayed to do business. And as Mr. Gaunt bantered with them, treating this odd back-door commerce as an amusing diversion at the end of a long day, they relaxed.

Mr. Gaunt had enjoyed his shop, but he never felt so comfortable behind plate-glass and under a roof as he did here, on the edge of the air, with the first breezes of the coming storm stirring his hair. The shop, with its clever display lights on ceiling-mounted tracks, was all right… but this was better. This was always better.

He had begun business many years ago-as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer’s heart. He had sold his wares from the back of the wagon… and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought.

Times changed; methods changed; faces, too. But when the faces were needful they were always the same, the faces of sheep who have lost their shepherd, and it was with this sort of commerce that he felt most at home, most like that wandering peddler of old, standing not behind a fancy counter with a Sweda cash register nearby but behind a plain wooden table, making change out of a cigar-box and selling them the same item over and over and over again.

The goods which had so attracted the residents of Castle Rockthe black pearls, the holy relics, the carnival glass, the pipes, the old comic books, the baseball cards, the antique kaleidoscopeswere all gone. Mr. Gaunt had gotten down to his real business, and at the end of things, the real business was always the same. The ultimate item had changed with the years, just like everything else, but such changes were surface things, frosting of different flavors on the same dark and bitter cake.

At the end, Mr. Gaunt always sold them weapons… and they always bought.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Warburton!” Mr. Gaunt said, taking a five-dollar bill from the black janitor. He handed him back a single and one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought from Boston.

“Thank you, Miss Milliken!” He took ten and gave back eight.

He charged them what they could afford-not a penny more or a penny less. Each according to his means was Mr. Gaunt’s motto, and never mind each according to his needs, because they were all needful things, and he had come here to fill their emptiness and end their aches.

“Good to see you, Mr. Emerson!”

Oh, it was always good, so very good, to be doing business in the old way again. And business had never been better.

2

Alan Pangborn wasn’t in Castle Rock. While the reporters and the State Police gathered at one end of Main Street and Leland Gaunt conducted his going-out-of-business sale halfway up the hill, Alan was sitting at the nurses’ station of the Blumer Wing in Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.

The Blumer Wing was small-only fourteen patient rooms but what it lacked in size it made up for in color. The walls of the inpatient rooms were painted in bright primary shades. A mobile hung from the ceiling in the nurses’ station, the birds depending from it swinging and dipping gracefully around a central spindle.

Alan was sitting in front of a huge mural which depicted a medley of Mother Goose rhymes. One section of the mural showed a man leaning across a table, holding something out to a small boy, obviously a hick, who looked both frightened and fascinated. Something about this particular image had struck Alan, and a snatch of childhood rhyme rose like a whisper in his mind: Simple Simon met a pie-man going to the fair.

“Simple Simon,” said the pie-man, “come and taste my wares!”

A ripple of gooseflesh had broken out on Alan’s arms-tiny bumps like beads of cold sweat. He couldn’t say why, and that seemed perfectly normal. Never in his entire life had he felt as shaken, as scared, as deeply confused as he did right now. Something totally beyond his ability to understand was happening in Castle Rock. it had become clearly apparent only late this afternoon, when everything had seemed to blow sky-high at once, but it had begun days, maybe even a week, ago. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck had been only the first outward signs.

And he was terribly afraid that things were still progressing while he sat here with Simple Simon and the pie-man.

A nurse, Miss Hendrie according to the small name-plate on her breast, walked up the corridor on faintly squeaking crepe soles, weaving her way gracefully among the toys which littered the hall.

When Alan came in, half a dozen kids, some with limbs in casts or slings, some with the partial baldness he associated with chemotherapy treatments, had been playing in the hall, trading blocks and trucks, shouting amiably to each other. Now it was the supper hour, and they had gone either down to the cafeteria or back to their rooms.

“How is he?” Alan asked Miss Hendrie.

“No change.” She looked at Alan with a calm expression which contained an element of hostility. “Sleeping. He should be sleeping.

He has had a great shock.”

“What do you hear from his parents?”

“We called the father’s place of employment in South Paris. He had an installation job over in New Hampshire this afternoon. He’s left for home, I understand, and will be informed when he arrives.

He should get here around nine, I would think, but of course it’s impossible to tell.”

“What about the mother?”

“I don’t know,” Miss Hendrie said. The hostility was more apparent now, but it was no longer aimed at Alan. “I didn’t make that call. All I know is what I see-she’s not here. This little boy saw his brother commit suicide with a rifle, and although it happened at home, the mother is not here yet. You’ll have to excuse me now-I have to fill the med-cart.”

“Of course,” Alan muttered. He watched her as she started away, then rose from his chair. “Miss Hendrie?”

She turned to him. Her eyes were still calm, but her raised brows expressed annoyance.

“Miss Hendrie, I really do need to talk with Sean Rusk. I think I need to talk to him very badly.”

“Oh?” Her voice was cool.

“Something-” Alan suddenly thought of Polly and his voice cracked.

He cleared his throat and pushed on. “Something is going on in my town. The suicide of Brian Rusk is only part of it, I believe. And I also believe that Sean Rusk may have the key to the rest of it.”

“Sheriff Pangborn, Sean Rusk is only seven years old. And if he does know something, why aren’t there other policemen here?”

Other policemen, he thought. What she means are qualified policemen. Policemen who don’t interview eleven-year-old boys on the street and then send them home to commit suicide in the garage.

“Because they’ve got their hands full,” Alan said, “and because they don’t know the town the way I do.”

“I see.” She turned to go again.

“Miss Hendrie.”

“Sheriff, I’m short-handed this evening and very b-”

“Brian Rusk wasn’t the only Castle Rock fatality today. There were at least three others. Another man, the owner of the local tavern, has been taken to the hospital in Norway with gunshot trauma. He may live, but it’s going to be touch and go with him for the next thirty-six hours or so. And I have a hunch the killing isn’t done.”

He had finally succeeded in capturing all of her attention.

“You believe Sean Rusk knows something about this?”

“He may know why his brother killed himself. If he does, that may open up the rest of it. So if he wakes up, will you tell me?”

She hesitated, then said, “That depends on his mental state when he does, Sheriff. I’m not going to allow you to make a hysterical little boy’s condition worse, no matter what is going on in your town.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Good.” She gave him a look which said,just sit there and don’t make trouble for me, then, and went back behind the high desk. She sat down, and he could hear her putting bottles and boxes on the med-cart.

Alan got up, went to the pay phone in the hall, and dialled Polly’s number again. And once again it simply rang on and on. He dialled You Sew and Sew, got the answering machine, and racked the phone. He went back to his chair, sat in it, and stared at the Mother Goose mural some more.

You forgot to ask me one question, Miss Hendrie, Alan thought.

You forgot to ask me why I’m here if there’s so much going on in the seat of the county I was elected to preserve and protect. You forgot to ask me why I’m not leading the investigation while some lessessentialofficer@IdSeatThomas,forinstance sitshere,waiting for Sean Rusk to wake up. You forgot to ask those things, Miss Hendrie, and I know a secret. I’m glad you forgot. That’s the secret.

The reason was as simple as it was humiliating. Except in Portland and Bangor, murder belonged not to the Sheriff’s Office but to the State Police. Henry Payton had winked at that in the wake of Nettle and Wilma’s duel, but he was not winking anymore. He couldn’t afford to. Representatives of every southern Maine newspaper and TV station were either in Castle Rock right now or on their way. They would be joined by their colleagues from all over the state before very much longer… and if this really was not over, as Alan suspected, they would shortly be joined by more media people from points south.

That was the simple reality of the situation, but it didn’t change the way Alan felt. He felt like a pitcher who can’t get the job done and is sent to the showers by the coach. It was an indescribably shitty way to feel. He sat in front of Simple Simon and once again began to add up the score.

Lester Pratt, dead. He had come to the Sheriff’s Office in a jealous frenzy and had attacked John LaPointe. It was over his girl, apparently, althoughjohn had told Alan before the ambulance came that he had not dated Sally Ratcliffe in over a year. “I only thaw her to thpeek to wunth in awhile on the thtreet, and even then thee cut me dead motht of the time. Thee dethided I’m one of the hellhound.” He had touched his broken nose and winced. “Right now I feel hellhound.”

John was now hospitalized in Norway with a broken nose, a fractured jaw, and possible internal injuries.

Sheila Brigham was also in the hospital. Shock.

Hugh Priest and Billy Tupper were both dead. That news had come in just as Sheila was beginning to fall apart. The call came from a beer deliveryman, who’d had the sense to call Medical Assistance before calling the Sheriff. The man had been almost as hysterical as Sheila Brigham, and Alan hadn’t blamed him. By then he had been feeling pretty hysterical himself.

Henry Beaufort, in critical condition as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.

Norris Ridgewick, missing… and that somehow hurt the most.

Alan had looked around for him after receiving the deliveryman’s call, but Norris was just gone. Alan had assumed at the time that he must have gone outside to formally arrest Danforth and would return with the Heacl Selectman in tow, but events shortly proved that no one had arrested Keeton. Alan supposed the Staties would arrest him if they ran across him while they pursued other lines of investigation, but otherwise, no. They had more important things to do. In the meantime, Norris was just gone. Wherever he was, he’d gotten there on foot; when Alan left town, Norris’s VW had still been lying on its side in the middle of Lower Main Street.

The witnesses said Buster had crawled into his Cadillac through the window and simply driven away. The only person who had tried to stop him had paid a steep price. Scott Garson was hospitalized here at Northern Cumberland with a broken jaw, broken cheekbone, broken wrist, and three broken fingers. It could have been worse; the bystanders claimed Buster had actively tried to run the man down as he lay in the street.

Lenny Partridge, broken collarbone and God knew how many broken ribs, was also here someplace. Andy Clutterbuck had weighed in with news of this fresh disaster while Alan was still trying to comprehend the fact that the town’s Head Selectman was now a fugitive from justice handcuffed to a big red Cadillac. Hugh Priest had apparently stopped Lenny, tossed him across the road, and driven away in the old man’s car. Alan supposed they would find Lenny’s car in the parking lot of The Mellow Tiger, since Hugh had bitten the dust there.

And, of course, there was Brian Rusk, who had eaten a bullet at the ripe old age of eleven. Clut had barely begun to tell his tale when the phone rang again. Sheila was gone by then, and Alan had picked up on the voice of a screaming, hysterical little boy-Sean Rusk, who had dialled the number on the bright orange sticker beside the kitchen telephone.

All in all, Medical Assistance ambulances and Rescue Services units from four different towns had made afternoon stops in Castle Rock.

Now, sitting with his back to Simple Simon and the pie-man, watching the plastic birds as they swung and dipped around their spindle, Alan turned once more to Hugh and Lenny Partridge. Their confrontation was hardly the biggest to take place in Castle Rock today, but it was one of the oddest… and Alan sensed that a key to this business might be hidden in its very oddity.

“Why in God’s name didn’t Hugh take his own car, if he had a hard-on for Henry Beaufort?” Alan had asked Clut, running his hands through hair which was already wildly disarranged. “Why bother with Lenny’s old piece of shit?”

“Because Hugh’s Buick was standing on four flats. Looked like somebody ripped the shit out of them with a knife.” Clut had shrugged, looking uneasily at the shambles the Sheriff’s Office had become.

“Maybe he thought Henry Beaufort did it.”

Yes, Alan thought now. Maybe so. It was crazy, but was it any crazier than Wilma jerzyck thinking Nettle Cobb had first splattered mud on her sheets and then thrown rocks through the windows of her house? Any crazier than Nettle thinking Wilma had killed her dog?

Before he had a chance to question Clut any further, Henry Payton had come in and told Alan, as kindly as he could, that he was taking the case. Alan nodded. “There’s one thing you need to find out, Henry, as soon as you can.”

“What’s that, Alan?” Henry had asked, but Alan saw with a sinking feeling that Henry was listening to him with only half an ear. His old friend-the first real friend Alan had made in the wider law-enforcement community after winning the job as Sheriff, and a very valuable friend he had turned out to be-was already concentrating on other things. How he would deploy his forces, given the wide spread of the incidents, was probably chief among them.

“You need to find out if Henry Beaufort was as angry at Hugh Priest as Hugh apparently was at him. You can’t ask him now, I understand he’s unconscious, but when he wakes up-”

“Will do,” Henry said, and clapped Alan on the shoulder. “Will do.” Then, raising his voice: “Brooks! Morrison! Over here!”

Alan watched him move off and thought of going after him. Of grabbing him and making him listen. He didn’t do it, because Henry and Hugh and Lester and John-even Wilma and Nettle were beginning to lose any feeling of real importance to him. The dead were dead; the wounded were being looked after; the crimes had been committed.

Except Alan had a terrible, sneaking suspicion that the real crime was still going on.

When Henry had walked away to brief his men, Alan had called Clut over once again. The Deputy came with his hands stuffed into his pockets and a morose look on his face. “We been replaced, Alan,” he said. “Taken right out of the picture. God damn!”

“Not entirely,” Alan said, hoping he sounded as if he really believed this. “You’re going to be my liaison here, Clut.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the Rusk house.”

But when he got there, both Brian and Sean Rusk were gone.

The ambulance which was taking care of the unfortunate Scott Garson had swung by to pick up Sean; they were on their way to Northern Cumberland Hospital. Harry Samuels’s second hearse, an old converted Lincoln, had gotten Brian Rusk and would take him to Oxford, pending autopsy. Harry’s better hearse the one he referred to as “the company car"-had already left for the same place with Hugh and Billy Tupper.

Alan thought, The bodies will be stacked in that tiny morgue over there like cordwood.

It was when he got to the Rusk home that Alan realized-in his gut as well as in his head-how completely he had been taken out of the play. Two of Henry’s C.I.D. men were there ahead of him, and they made it clear that Alan could hang around only as long as he didn’t try to stick in an oar and help them row. He had stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, watching them, feeling about as useful as a third wheel on a motor-scooter. Cora Rusk’s responses were slow, almost doped.

Alan thought it might be shock, or perhaps the ambulance attendants who were transporting her remaining son to the hospital had given her some prescription mercy before they left. She reminded him eerily of the way Norris had looked as he had crawled from the window of his overturned VW.

Whether it was because of a tranquilizer or just shock, the detectives weren’t getting much of value from her. She wasn’t quite weeping, but she was clearly unable to concentrate on their questions enough to make helpful responses. She didn’t know anything, she told them; she had been upstairs, taking a nap. Poor Brian, she kept saying.

Poor, poor Brian. But she expressed this sentiment in a drone which Alan found creepy, and she kept toying with a pair of old sunglasses which lay beside her on the kitchen table. One of the bows had been mended with adhesive tape, and one of the lenses was cracked.

Alan had left in disgust and come here, to the hospital.

Now he got up and went to the pay telephone down the hall in the main lobby. He tried Polly again, got no answer, and then dialled the Sheriff’s Office. The voice which answered growled, “State Police,” and Alan felt a childish surge of jealousy. He identified himself and asked for Clut. After a wait of almost five minutes, Clut came on the line.

“Sorry, Alan. They just let the phone lay there on the desk.

Lucky I came over to check, or you’d still be waiting. Darned old Staties don’t care one bit about us.”

“Don’t worry about it, Clut. Has anyone collared Keeton yet?”

“Well… I don’t know how to tell you this, Alan, but. -.”

Alan felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach and closed his eyes.

He had been right; it wasn’t over.

“Just tell me,” he said. “Never mind the protocol.”

“Buster-Danforth, I mean@rove home and used a screwdriver to knock the doorhandle off his Cadillac. You know, where he was cuffed.”

“I know,” Alan agreed. His eyes were still shut.

“Well… he killed his wife, Alan. With a hammer. It wasn’t a State cop that found her, because the Staties weren’t much interested in Buster up to twenty minutes ago. It was Seat Thomas. He drove by Buster’s house to double check. He reported in what he found, and got back here not five minutes ago. He’s having chest pains, he says, and I’m not surprised. He told me that Buster took her face ’bout right off. Said there’s guts and hair everyplace. There’s a platoon or so of Payton’s bluejackets up there on the View now.

I put Seat in your office. Figured he better sit down before he fell down.”

4 6 Jesus Christ, Clut-take him over to Ray Van Allen, fast. He’s sixty-two and been smoking Camels all his damn life.”

“Ray went to Oxford, Alan. He’s trying to help the doctors patch up Henry Beaufort.”

“His P.A. then-what’s his name? Frankel. Everett Frankel.”

“Not around. I tried both the office and his house.”

“Well, what does his wife say?”

“Ev’s a bachelor, Alan.”

“Oh. Christ.” Someone had scrawled a bit of graffiti over the telephone. Don’t worry, be happy, it said. Alan considered this sourly.

“I can take him to the hospital myself,” Clut offered.

“I need you right where you are,” Alan said. “Have the reporters and TV people shown up?”

“Yeah. The place is crawling with them.”

“Well, check on Seat as soon as we’re done here. If he doesn’t feel any better, here’s what you do: go out front, grab a reporter who looks halfway bright to you, deputize him, and have him drive Seat over here to Northern Cumberland.”

“Okay.” Clut hesitated, then burst out: “I wanted to go over to the Keeton place, but the State Police… they won’t let me onto the crime-scene! How do you like that, Alan? Those bastards won’t let a County Deputy Sheriff onto the crime-scene!”

“I know how you feel. I don’t like it much myself. But they’re doing their job. Can you see Seat from where you are, Clut?”

“Yuh.”

“Well? Is he alive?”

“He’s sitting behind your desk, smoking a cigarette and looking at this month’s Rural Law Enforcement.”

“Right,” Alan said. He felt like laughing or crying or doing both at the same time. “That figures. Has Polly Chalmers called, Clut?”

“N… wait a minute, here’s the log. I thought it was gone. She did call, Alan. Just before three-thirty.”

Alan grimaced. “I know about that one. Anything later?”

“Not that I see here, but that doesn’t mean much. With Sheila gone and these darned old State Bears clumping around, who can tell for sure?”

“Thanks, Clut. Is there anything else I should know?”

“Yeah, a couple of things.”

“Shoot.”

“They’ve got the gun Hugh used to shoot Henry, but David Friedman from State Police Ballistics says he doesn’t know what it is. An automatic pistol of some kind, but the guy said he’s never seen one quite like it.”

“Are you sure it was David Friedman?” Alan asked. “Friedman, yeah-that was the guy’s name.”

“He must know. Dave Friedman’s a walking Shooter’s Bible.”

“He doesn’t, though. I stood right there while he was talking to your pal Payton. He said it’s a little like a German Mauser, but it lacked the normal markings and the slide was different. I think they sent it to Augusta with about a ton of other evidence.”

“What else?”

“They found an anonymous note in Henry Beaufort’s yard,” Clut said. “It was crumpled into a ball beside his car-you know that classic T-Bird of his? It was vandalized, too. just like Hugh’s.”

Alan felt as if a large soft hand had just whacked him across the face. “What did the note say, Clut?”

“Just a minute.” He heard a faint whick-whick sound as Clut paged through his notebook. “Here it is. ’don’t you ever cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damn frog."’ “Frog?”

“That’s what it says.” Clut giggled nervously. “The word ’ever’

and the word ’frog’ have got lines drawn under them.”

“And you say the car was vandalized?”

“That’s right. Tires slashed, just like Hugh’s. And a big long scratch down the passenger side. Ouch!”

“Okay,” Alan said, “here’s something else for you to do. Go to the barber shop, and then to the billiard parlor if you need to. Find out who it was Henry cut off this week or last.”

“But the State Police-”

“Fuck the State Police!” Alan said feelingly. “It’s our town. We know who to ask and where to find them. Do you want to tell me you can’t lay hands on someone who’ll know this story in just about five minutes?”

“Of course not,” Clut said. “I saw Charlie Fortin when I came back from Castle Hill, noodling with a bunch of guys in front of the Western Auto. If Henry was bumping heads with somebody, Charlie will know who. Hell, the Tiger’s Charlie’s home away from home.”

“Yes. But were the State Police questioning him?”

“Well… no.”

“No. So you question him. But I think we both already know the answer, don’t we?”

“Hugh Priest,” Clut said. “it has the unmistakable clang of a ringer to me,” Alan said. He thought, This is maybe not so different from Henry Payton’s first guess after all. “Okay, Alan. I’ll get on it.”

“And call me back the minute you know for sure. The second.” He gave Clut the number, then made him recite it back so he could be sure Clut had copied it down correctly. “I will,” Clut said, and then burst out furiously, “What’s going on, Alan? Goddammit, what’s going on around here?”

“I don’t know.” Alan felt very old, very tired… and angry. No longer angry at Payton for shunting him off the case, but angry at whoever was responsible for these gruesome fireworks. And he felt more and more sure that, when they got to the bottom of it, they would discover that a single agency had been at work all along.

Wilma and Nettle. Henry and Hugh. Lester and John. Someone had wired them together like packets of high explosive. “I don’t know, Clut, but we’re going to find out.”

He hung up and dialled Polly’s number again. His urge to make things right with her, to understand what had happened to make her so furious with him, was fading. The replacement feeling which had begun to creep over him was even less comforting: a deep, unfocused dread; a growing feeling that she was in danger.

Ring, ring, ring… but no answer.

Polly, I love you and we need to talk. Please pick up the phone.

Polly, I love you and we need to talk. Please pick up the phone.

Polly, I love you the litany ran around in his head like a wind-up toy.

He wanted to call Clut back and ask him to check on her right away, before he did anything else, but couldn’t. That would be very wrong when there might be other packets of explosive still waiting to explode in The Rock.

Yes, but Alan… suppose Polly’s one of them?

That thought poked some buried association loose, but he was unable to grasp it before it floated away.

Alan slowly hung up the telephone, cutting it off in mid-ring as he settled it into its cradle.

3

Polly could stand it no longer. She rolled on her side, reached for the telephone… and it stilled in mid-ring.

Good, she thought. But was it?

She was lying on her bed, listening to the sound of approaching thunder. It was hot upstairs-as hot as the middle of July-but opening the windows was not an option, because she’d had Dave Phillips, one of the local handymen and caretakers, put on her storm windows and doors just the week before. So she had taken off the old jeans and shirt she had worn on her expedition to the country and folded them neatly over the chair by the door. Now she lay on the bed in her underwear, wanting a little nap before she got up and showered, but unable to go to sleep.

Some of it was the sirens, but more of it was Alan; what Alan had done. She could not comprehend this grotesque betrayal of all she had believed and all she had trusted, but neither could she escape it. Her mind would turn to something else (those sirens, for instance, and how they sounded like the end of the world) and then suddenly it would be there again, how he had gone behind her back, how he had sneaked. It was like being poked by the splintery end of a board in some tender, secret place.

Oh Alan, how could you? she asked him-and herself-again.

The voice which replied surprised her. It was Aunt Evvie’s voice, and beneath the dry lack of sentiment that had always been her way, Polly felt a disquieting, powerful anger.

If you had told him the truth in the first place, girl, he never would have had to.

Polly sat up quickly. That was a disturbing voice, all right, and the most disturbing thing about it was the fact that it was her own voice. Aunt Evvie was many years dead. This was her own subconscious, using Aunt Evvie to express its anger the way a shy ventriloquist might use his dummy to ask a pretty girl for a date, andStop it, girl-didn’t I once tell you this town “sfull of ghosts? Maybe it is me. Maybe it is.

Polly uttered a whimpering, frightened cry and then pressed her hand against her mouth.

Or maybe it isn’t. In the end, who it is don’t matter much, does it?

The question is this, Trisha: Who sinned first? Who lied first?

Who covered up first? Who cast the first stone?

“That’s not fair!” Polly shouted into the hot room, and then looked at her own frightened, wide-eyed reflection in the bedroom mirror. She waited for the voice of Aunt Evvie to come back, and when it didn’t, she slowly lay back down again.

Perhaps she had sinned first, if omitting part of the truth and telling a few white lies was sinning. Perhaps she had covered up first. But did that give Alan the right to open an investigation on her, the way a law officer might open an investigation on a known felon? Did it give him the right to put her name on some interstate law-enforcement wire… or send out a tracer on her, if that was what they called it… or… or…

Never mind, Polly, a voice-one she knew-whispered. Stop tearing yourself apart over what was very proper behavior on your part. I mean, after all! You heard the guilt in his voice, didn’t you?

“Yes!” she muttered fiercely into the pillow. “That’s right, I did!

What about that, Aunt Evvie?” There was no answer… only a queer, light tugging (the question is this Trisha) at her subconscious mind. As if she had forgotten something, left something out (would you like a sweet Trisha) of the equation.

Polly rolled restlessly onto her side, and the azka tumbled across the fullness of one breast. She heard something inside scratch delicately at the silver wall of its prison.

No, Polly thought, it’s just something shifting. Something inert.

This idea that there really is something alive in there… it’s)just your imagination.

Scratch-scritch-scratch.

The silver ball jiggled minutely between the white cotton cup of her bra and the coverlet of the bed.

Scratchy-scri’tch-scratch.

That thing is alive, Trisha, Aunt Evvie said. That thing is alive, and you know it, Don’t be silly, Polly told her, tossing over to the other side.

How could there possibly be some creature in there? I suppose it might be able to breathe through all those tiny holes, but what in God’s name would it eat?

Maybe, Aunt Evvie replied with soft implacability, i’t’s eating You, Trisha.

“Polly,” she murmured. “My name is Polly.”

This time the tug at her subconscious mind was strongersomehow alarming-and for a moment she was almost able to grasp it. Then the telephone began to ring again. She gasped and sat up, her face wearing a look of tired dismay. Pride and longing were at war there.

Talk to him, Trisha-what can it hurt? Better still, listen to him.

You didn’t do much of that before, did you?

I don’t want to talk to him. Not after what he did.

But you still love him.

Yes; that was true. The only thing was, now she hated him as well.

The voice of Aunt Evvie rose once more, gusting angrily in her mind. Do you want to be a ghost all your life, Trisha? What’s the matter with you, girl?

Polly reached out for the telephone in a mockery of decisiveness.

Her hand-her limber, pain-free hand-faltered just short of the handset.

Because maybe it wasn’t Alan. Maybe it was Mr. Gaunt.

Maybe Mr. Gaunt wanted to tell her that he wasn’t finished with her yet, that she hadn’t finished paying yet.

She made another move toward the telephone-this time the tips of her fingers actually brushed the plastic casing-and then she drew back.

Her hand clutched its partner and they folded into a nervous ball on her belly. She was afraid of Aunt Evvie’s dead voice, of what she had done this afternoon, of what Mr. Gaunt (or Alan!) might tell the town about her dead son, of what yonder confusion of sirens and racing cars might mean.

But more than all of these things, she had discovered, she was afraid of Leland Gaunt himself. She felt as if someone had tied her to the clapper of a great iron bell, a bell which would simultaneously deafen her, drive her mad, and crush her to a pulp if it began to ring.

The telephone fell quiet.

Outside, another siren began to scream, and as it began to fade toward the Tin Bridge, the thunder rolled again. Closer than ever now.

Take it off, the voice of Aunt Evvie whispered. Take it off, honey. You can do it-his power is over need, not will. Take it off. Break his hold on you.

But she was looking at the telephone and remembering the night-was it less than a week ago?-when she had reached for it and struck it with her fingers, knocking it to the floor. She remembered the pain which had clawed its way up her arm like a hungry ratwith broken teeth. She couldn’tgo back to that. She just couldn’t.

Could she?

Something nasty is going on in The Rock tonight, Aunt Evvie said.

Do you want to wake up tomorrow and have to figure out how much of it was YOUR nastiness? Is that really a score you want to add up, Trisha?

“You don’t understand,” she moaned. “It wasn’t on Alan, it was on Ace! Ace Merrill! And he deserves whatever he gets!”

The implacable voice of Aunt Evvie returned: Then so do you, honey. So do you.

4

At twenty minutes past six on that Tuesday evening, as the thunderheads neared and real dark began to overtake twilight, the State Police officer who had replaced Sheila Brigham in dispatch came out into the Sheriff’s Office bullpen. He skirted the large area, roughly diamond-shaped, which was marked with C R I M E - S C E N E tape and hurried over to where Henry Payton stood.

Payton looked dishevelled and unhappy. He had spent the previous five minutes with the ladies and gentlemen of the press, and he felt as he always did after one of these confrontations: as if he had been coated with honey and then forced to roll in a large pile of ant-infested hyena-shit. His statement had not been as well prepared or as unassailably vague-as he would have liked. The TV people had forced his hand. They wanted to do live updates during the six-to-six-thirty time-slot when the local news was broadcast-felt they had to do live updates-and if he didn’t throw them some kind of bone, they were apt to crucify him at eleven. They had almost crucified him anyway. He had come as close as he ever had in his entire career to admitting he didn’t have a fucking clue. He had not left this impromptu press conference; he had escaped it.

Payton found himself wishing he had listened more closely to Alan.

When he arrived, it had seemed that the job was essentially damage control. Now he wondered, because there had been another murder since he took the case-a woman named Myrtle Keeton.

Her husband was still out there someplace, probably headed over the hills and far away by now, but just possibly still galloping gaily around this weird little town. A man who had offed his wife with a hammer. A prime psyche, in other words.

The trouble was, he didn’t know these people. Alan and his deputies did, but both Alan and Ridgewick were gone. LaPointe was in the hospital, probably hoping the doctors could get his nose on straight again. He looked around for Clutterbuck and was somehow not surprised to see that he had also melted away.

You want it, Henry? he heard Alan say inside his head. Fine.

Take it. And as far as suspects go, why not try the phone hook?

“Lieutenant Payton? Lieutenant Payton!” It was the officer from dispatch.

“What?” Henry growled.

“I’ve got Dr. Van Allen on the radio. He wants to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“He wouldn’t say. He only told me he had to speak to you.”

Henry Payton walked into the dispatcher’s office feeling more and more like a kid riding a bike with no brakes down a steep hill with a drop-off on one side, a rock wall on the other, and a pack of hungry wolves with reporters’ faces behind him.

He picked up the mike. “This is Payton, come back.”

“Lieutenant Payton, this is Dr. Van Allen. County Medical Examiner?” The voice was hollow and distant, broken up occasionally by heavy bursts of static. That would be the approaching storm, Henry knew. More fun with Dick and Jane.

“Yes, I know who you are,” Henry said. “You took Mr. Beaufort to Oxford. How is he, come back?”

“He’s-” Crackle crackle buzz snacker.

“You’re breaking up, Dr. Van Allen,” Henry said, speaking as patiently as he could. “We’ve got what looks to be a really firstclass electrical storm on the way here. Please say again. K.”

“Dead!” Van Allen shouted through a break in the static. “He died in the ambulance, but we do not believe it was gunshot trauma which killed him. Do you understand? We do not believe this patient died of gunshot trauma. His brain first underwent atypical edema and then ruptured. The most likely diagnosis is that,some toxic substance, some extremely toxic substance, was introduced into his blood when he was shot. This same substance appears to have literally burst his heart open. Please acknowledge.”

Oh Jesus, Henry Payton thought. He pulled down his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and then pressed the transmit button again.

“I acknowledge your message, Dr. Van Allen, but I’ll be damned if I understand it. K.”

“The toxin was very likely on the bullets in the gun that shot him. The infection appears to spread slowly at first, then to pick up speed. We have two clear, fan-shaped areas of introduction here the cheek-wound and the chest-wound. It’s very important to-” Crackle snackle buzzzit.

“-has it? Ten-four?”

“Say again, Dr. Van Allen.” Henry wished to Christ the man had simply picked up the telephone. “Please say again, come back.”

“Who has that gun?” Van Allen shrieked. “Ten-four!”

“David Friedman. Ballistics. He’s taken it to Augusta. K.”

“Would he have unloaded it first-ten-four?”

“Yes. That’s standard practice. Come back.”

“Was it a revolver or an automatic, Lieutenant Payton? That’s of prime importance right now. Ten-four.”

“An automatic. K.”

“Would he have unloaded the clip? Ten-four.”

“He’d do that at Augusta.” Payton sat down heavily in the dispatcher’s chair. Suddenly he needed to take a heavy dump.

“Tenfour. “No! No, he mustn’t! He must not do that-do you copy?”

“I copy,” Henry said. “I’ll leave a message for him at the Ballistics Lab, saying he’s to leave the goddam bullets in the goddam clip until we get this latest goddam snafu sorted the goddam hell out.”

He felt a childish pleasure at the realization that this was going out on the air… and then he wondered how many of the reporters out front were monitoring him on their Bearcats. “Listen, Dr. Van Allen, we’ve got no business talking about this on the radio. Ten-four.”

“Never mind the public-relations aspect,” Van Allen came back harshly. “We’re talking about a man’s life here, Lieutenant PaytonI tried to get you on the telephone and couldn’t get through. Tell your man Friedman to examine his hands carefully for scratches, small nicks, even hangnails. If he has the smallest break in the skin of his hands, he’s to go to the nearest hospital immediately. I have no way of knowing if the crap we’re dealing with was on the casing of the ammunition clip as well as on the bullets themselves. And it isn’t the kind of thing he wants to take the slightest chance with.

This stuff is deadly. Ten-four?”

“I acknowledge,” Henry heard himself say. He found himself wishing he were anywhere but here-but since he was here, he wished that Alan Pangborn were here beside him. Since arriving in Castle Rock, he had come more and more to feel like Brer Rabbit stuck in the Tar Baby.

“What is it? K?”

“We don’t know yet. Not curare, because there was no paralysis until the very end. Also, curare is relatively painless, and Mr.

Beaufort suffered a great deal. All we know right now is that it started slowly and then moved like a freight-train. Ten-four.”

“That’s all? Ten-four.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ray Van Allen ejaculated. “Isn’t it enough?

Tenfour.”

“Yes. I guess it is. K.”

“Just be glad-” Crackle crackle brrack!

“Say again, Dr. Van Allen. Say again. Ten-four.”

Through the swelling ocean of static he heard Dr. Van Allen say, “Just be glad you’ve got the gun in custody. That you don’t have to worry about it doing any more damage. Ten-four.”

“You got that right, buddy. Ten-forty, out.”

5

Cora Rusk turned onto Main Street and walked slowly toward Needful Things. She passed a bright yellow Ford Econoline van with WPTD CHANNEL 5 ACTION NEWS emblazoned on the side, but did not see Danforth “Buster” Keeton looking out of the driver’s window at her with unblinking eyes. She probably wouldn’t have recognized him in any case; Buster had become, in a manner of speaking, a new man. And even if she had seen and recognized him, it would have meant nothing to Cora. She had her own problems and sorrows. Most of all, she had her own anger. And none of this concerned her dead son.

In one hand, Cora Rusk held a pair of broken sunglasses.

It had seemed to her that the police were going to question her forever… or at least until she went mad. Go away! she wanted to scream at them. Stop asking me all these stupid questions about Brian!

Arrest him if he’s in trouble, his father willfix it, fixing things I. s all he’s good for, but leave me alone! I’ve got a date with The King, and I can’t keep him waiting!

At one point she had seen Sheriff Pangborn leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the back stoop, his arms folded across his chest, and she had been on the very verge of blurting this out, thinking he would understand. He wasn’t like these others-he was from town, he would know about Needful Things, he would have bought his own special item there, he would understand.

Except Mr. Gaunt had spoken up in her mind just then, as calm and as reasonable as ever. No, Cora@on’t talk to him. He wouldn’t understand. He’s not like you. He’s not a smart shopper. Tell them you want to go to the hospital and see your other boy. That will get rid of them, at least for awhile. After that it won’t matter.

So she had told them just that, and it worked like a charm. She had even managed to squeeze out a tear or two, thinking not about Brian but about how sad Elvis must feel, wandering around Graceland without her. Poor lost King!

They had left, all but the two or three who were out in the garage. Cora didn’t know what they were doing or what they could possibly want out there, and she didn’t care. She grabbed her magic sunglasses off the table and hurried upstairs. Once she was in her room she slipped out of her robe, lay down on her bed, and put them on.

At once she was in Graceland again. Relief, anticipation, and amazing horniness filled her.

She swept up the curving staircase, cool and nude, to the upstairs hall, hung with jungle tapestries and nearly as wide as a freeway.

She walked down to the closed double doors at the far end, her bare feet whispering in the deep nap of the carpet. She saw her fingers reach out and close around the handles. She pushed the doors open, revealing The King’s bedroom, a room which was all black and white-black walls, white shag rug, black drapes over the windows, white trim on the black bedspread-except for the ceiling, which was painted midnight blue with a thousand twinkly electric stars.

Then she looked at the bed and that was when the horror struck.

The King was on the bed, but The King was not alone.

Sitting on top of him, riding him like a pony, was Myra Evans.

She had turned her head and stared at Cora when the doors opened.

The King only kept looking up at Myra, blinking those sleepy, beautiful blue eyes of his.

“Myra!” Cora had exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” Myra said smugly, “I’m sure not vacuuming the floor.”

Cora gasped for breath, utterly stunned. “Well… well… well I’ll be butched! she cried, her voice rising as her wind returned.

“Then go be butched,” Myra said, pumping her hips faster, “and take those silly sunglasses off while you’re at it. They look stupid.

Get out of here. Go back to Castle Rock. We’re busy… aren’t we, E?”

“That’s raht, sweet thang,” The long said. “Just as busy as two twiddlybugs in a carpet.”

Horror turned to fury, and Cora’s paralysis broke with a snap.

She rushed at her so-called friend, meaning to rip her deceitful eyes from their sockets. But when she raised one clawed hand to do so, Myra reached out-never missing a stroke with her pumping hips as she did-and tore the sunglasses from Cora’s face with her own hand.

Cora had squeezed her eyes shut in surprise… and when she opened them, she had been lying in her own bed again. The sunglasses were on the floor, both lenses shattered.

“No,” Cora moaned, lurching out of bed. She wanted to shriek, but some inner voice-not her own-warned her that the police in the garage would hear if she did, and come running. “No, please no, please, pleeeease-” She tried to fit chunks of the broken lenses back into the streamlined gold frames, but it had been impossible. They were broken.

Broken by that evil whoring slut. Broken by herfriend, Myra Evans.

Her friend who had somehow found her own way to Graceland, her friend who was even now, as Cora tried to put together a priceless artifact that was irretrievably broken, making love to The King.

Cora looked up. Her eyes had become glittering black slits.

“I’ll butch her,” she had whispered hoarsely. “See if I don’t.”

6

She read the sign in the window of Needful Things, paused for a moment, thinking, and then walked around to the service alley. She brushed by Francine Pelletier, who was on her way out of the alley, putting something into her purse. Cora hardly even looked at her.

Halfway down the alley she saw Mr. Gaunt standing behind a wooden table which lay across the open back door of his shop like a barricade.

“Ah, Cora!” he exclaimed. “I was wondering when you’d drop by.”

“That bitch!” Cora spat. “That double-crossing little slut-bitch!”

“Pardon me, Cora,” Mr. Gaunt said with urbane politeness, “but you seem to have missed a button or two.” He pointed one of his odd, long fingers at the front of her dress.

Cora had slipped the first thing she’d found in the closet on over her nakedness, and had managed to do only the top button.

Below that one, the dress gaped open to the curls of her pubic hair. Her belly, swelled by a great many Ring-Dings, Yodels, and chocolate-covered cherries during Santa Barbara (and all her other shows), curved smoothly out.

“Who gives a shit?” Cora snapped.

“Not I,” Mr. Gaunt agreed serenely. “How may I help you?”

“That bitch is fucking The King. She broke my sunglasses. I want to kill her.”

“Do you,” Mr. Gaunt said, raising his eyebrows. “Well, I can’t say that I don’t sympathize, Cora, because I do. It may be that a woman who would steal another woman’s man deserves to live. I wouldn’t care to say on that subject one way or the other-I’ve been a businessman all my life, and know very little about matters of the heart. But a woman who deliberately breaks another woman’s most treasured possession well, that is a much more serious thing. Do you agree?”

She began to smile. It was a hard smile. It was a merciless smile.

It was a smile utterly devoid of sanity. “Too fucking right,” said Cora Rusk.

Mr. Gaunt turned around for a moment. When he faced Cora again, he was holding an automatic pistol in one hand.

“Might you be looking for something like this?” he asked.