Needful Things (32 page)

“Couple of bucks,” Keeton agreed dreamily.

“But if it
does
work, and if you can clear your mind of these ephemeral financial worries, come back and see me. We'll sit down and have coffee, just as we have this morning . . . and talk about Them.”

“It's gone too far to just put the money back,” Keeton said in the clear but disconnected tones of one who talks in his sleep. “There are more tracks than I can brush away in five days.”

“A lot can change in five days,” Mr. Gaunt said thoughtfully. He rose to his feet, moving with sinuous grace. “You've got a big day ahead of you . . . and so do I.”

“But Them,” Keeton protested. “What about Them?”

Gaunt placed one of his long, chilly hands on Keeton's arm, and even in his dazed state, Keeton felt his stomach curl up on itself at that touch. “We'll deal with Them later,” he said. “Don't you worry about a thing.”

“John!” Alan called as John LaPointe slipped into the Sheriff's Office by the alley door. “Good to see you!”

It was ten-thirty on Saturday morning and the Castle Rock Sheriff's Office was as deserted as it ever got. Norris was out fishing somewhere, and Seaton Thomas was down in Sanford, visiting his two old maid sisters. Sheila Brigham was at the “Our Lady of Serene Waters rectory, helping her brother draft another letter to the paper explaining the essentially harmless nature of Casino Nite.
Father Brigham also wanted the letter to express his belief that William Rose was as crazy as a cootiebug in a shitheap. One could not come right out and
say
such a thing, of course—not in a family newspaper—but Father John and Sister Sheila were doing the best they could to get the point across. Andy Clutterbuck was on duty somewhere, or so Alan assumed; he hadn't called in since Alan arrived at the office an hour ago. Until John showed up, the only other person in the Municipal Building seemed to be Eddie Warburton, who was fussing with the water-cooler in the corner.

“What's up, doc?” John asked, sitting on the corner of Alan's desk.

“On Saturday morning? Not much. But watch this.” Alan unbuttoned the right cuff of his khaki shirt and pushed the sleeve up. “Please notice that my hand never leaves my wrist.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. He pulled a stick of Juicy Fruit out of his pants pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and stuck it in his mouth.

Alan showed his open right palm, flipped his hand to display the back, then closed the hand into a fist. He reached into it with his left index finger and pulled out a tiny ear of silk. He waggled his eyebrows at John. “Not bad, huh?”

“If that's Sheila's scarf, she's gonna be unhappy to find it all wrinkled up and smelling of your sweat,” John said. He seemed less than poleaxed with wonder.

“Not my fault she left it on her desk,” Alan replied. “Besides, magicians don't sweat. Now say-hey and abracadabra!” He pulled Sheila's scarf from his fist and puffed it dramatically into the air. It billowed out, then settled onto Norris's typewriter like a brightly colored butterfly. Alan looked at John, then sighed. “Not that great, huh?”

“It's a neat trick,” John said, “but I've seen it a few times before. Like maybe thirty or forty?”

“What do you think, Eddie?” Alan called. “Not bad for a backwoods Deputy Dawg, huh?”

Eddie barely looked up from the cooler, which he was now filling from a supply of plastic jugs labelled
SPRING WATER
. “Didn't see, Shurf. Sorry.”

“Hopeless, both of you,” Alan said. “But I'm working
on a variation, John. It's going to wow you, I promise.”

“Uh-huh. Alan, do you still want me to check the bathrooms at that new restaurant out on the River Road?”

“I still do,” Alan said.

“Why do
I
always get the shit detail? Why can't Norris—”

“Norris checked the Happy Trails Campground johns in July
and
August,” Alan said. “In June I did it. Quit bitching, Johnny. It's just your turn. I want you to take water samples, too. Use a couple of the special pouches they sent from. Augusta. There's still a bunch in that cabinet in the hallway I think I saw 'em behind Norris's box of Hi-Ho crackers.”

“Okay,” John said, ‘“you got it. But at the risk of sounding like I'm bitching again, checking the water for wigglebugs is supposed to be the restaurant-owner's responsibility. I looked it up.”

“Of course it is” Alan said, “but we're talking Timmy Gagnon here, Johnny—what does that tell you?”

“It tells me I wouldn't buy a hamburger at the new Riverside B-B-Q Delish if I was dying of starvation.”

“Correct!” Alan exclaimed. He rose to his feet and clapped John on the shoulder. “I'm hoping we can put the sloppy little son of a bitch out of business before the stray dog and cat population of Castle Rock starts to decline.”

That's pretty sick, Alan.”

“Nope—that's Timmy Gagnon. Get the water samples this morning and I'll ship them off to State Health in Augusta before I leave tonight.”

“What are you up to this morning?”

Alan rolled down his sleeve and buttoned the cuff. “Right now I'm going upstreet to Needful Things,” he said. “I want to meet Mr. Leland Gaunt. He made quite an impression on Polly, and from what I hear around town, she's not the only one who's taken with him. Have you met him?”

“Not yet,” John said. The started toward the door. “Been by the place a couple of times, though. Interesting mix of stuff in the window.”

They walked past Eddie, who was now polishing the water-cooler's big glass bottle with a rag he had produced from his back pocket. He did not look at Alan and John as
they went by; he seemed lost in his own private universe. But as soon as the rear door had clicked shut behind them, Eddie Warburton hurried into the dispatcher's office and picked up the telephone.

“All right . . . yes . . . yes, I understand.”

Leland Gaunt stood beside his cash register, holding a Cobra cordless phone to his ear. A smile as thin as a new crescent moon curved his lips.

“Thank you, Eddie. Thank you very much.”

Gaunt strolled toward the curtain which closed off the shop from the area behind it. He poked his upper body through the curtain and bent over. When he pulled back through the curtain, he was holding a sign.

“You can go home now . . . yes . . . you may be sure I won't forget. I never forget a face or a service, Eddie, and that is one of the reasons why I strongly dislike being reminded of either. Goodbye.”

He pushed the
END
button without waiting for a response, collapsed the antenna, and dropped the telephone into the pocket of his smoking jacket. The shade was drawn over his door again. Mr. Gaunt reached between shade and glass to remove the sign which read

OPEN.

He replaced it with the one he had taken from behind the curtain, then went to the show window to watch Alan Pangborn approach. Pangborn looked into the window Gaunt was looking out of for some time before approaching the door; he even cupped his hands and pressed his nose against the glass for a few seconds. Although Gaunt was standing right in front of him with his arms folded, the Sheriff did not see him.

Mr. Gaunt found himself disliking Pangborn's face on sight. Nor did this much surprise him. He was even better at reading faces than he was at remembering them, and the words on this one were large and somehow dangerous.

Pangborn's face changed suddenly; the eyes widened a little, the good-humored mouth narrowed down to a tight slit. Gaunt felt a brief and totally uncharacteristic burst of fear.
He sees me!
he thought, although that, of course, was impossible. The Sheriff took half a step backward . . . and then laughed. Gaunt understood at once what had happened, but this did not moderate his instant deep dislike of Pangborn in the slightest.

“Get out of here, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Get out and leave me alone.”

Alan stood looking into the display window for a long time. He found himself wondering what, exactly, all the shouting was about. He had spoken to Rosalie Drake before going over to Polly's house yesterday evening, and Rosalie had made Needful Things sound like northern New England's answer to Tiffany's, but the set of china in the window didn't look like anything to get up in the night and write home to mother about—it was rummage-sale quality at best. Several of the plates were chipped, and a hairline crack ran right through the center of one.

Oh well, Alan thought, different strokes for different folks. That china's probably a hundred years old, worth a fortune, and I'm just too dumb to know it.

He cupped his hands to the glass in order to see beyond the display, but there was nothing to look at—the lights were off and the place was deserted. Then he thought he caught sight of someone—a strange, transparent someone looking out at him with ghostly and malevolent interest. He took half a step backward before realizing it was the reflection of his own face he was seeing. He laughed a little, embarrassed by his mistake.

He strolled to the door. The shade was drawn; a hand-lettered sign hung from a clear plastic suction cup.

GONE TO PORTLAND
TO RECEIVE A CONSIGNMENT OF GOODS

SORRY TO HAVE MISSED YOU
PLEASE COME AGAIN

Alan pulled his wallet from his back pocket, removed one of his business cards, and scribbled a brief message on the back.

Dear Mr. Gaunt,

I dropped by Saturday morning to say hello and welcome you to town. Sorry to have missed you. Hope you're enjoying Castle Rock! I'll drop by again on Monday. Maybe we could have a cup of coffee. If there's anything I can do for you, my numbers—home and office—are on the other side.

Alan Pangborn

He stooped, slid the card under the door, and stood up again. He looked into the display window a moment longer, wondering who would want that set of nondescript dishes. As he looked, a queerly pervasive feeling stole over him—a sense of being watched. Alan turned around and saw no one but Lester Pratt. Lester was putting one of those damned posters up on a telephone pole and not looking in his direction at all. Alan shrugged and headed back down the street toward the Municipal Building. Monday would be time enough to meet Leland Gaunt; Monday would be just fine.

Mr. Gaunt watched him out of sight, then went to the door and picked up the card Alan had slid beneath. He read both sides carefully, and then began to smile. The Sheriff meant to drop by again on Monday, did he? Well, that was just fine, because Mr. Gaunt had an idea that by the time Monday rolled around, Castle County's Sheriff was going to have other fish to fry. A whole mess of other fish. And that was just as well, because he had met men like Pangborn before, and they were good men to steer clear
of, at least while one was still building up one's business and feeling out one's clientele. Men like Pangborn saw too much.

“Something happened to you, Sheriff,” Gaunt said. “Something that's made you even more dangerous than you should be.
That's
on your face, too. What was it, I wonder? Was it something you did, something you saw, or both?”

He stood looking out onto the street, and his lips slowly pulled back from his large, uneven teeth. He spoke in the low, comfortable tones of one who has been his own best listener for a very long time.

“I'm given to understand you're something of a parlor prestidigitator, my uniformed friend. You like tricks. I'm going to show you a few new ones before I leave town. I'm confident they will amaze you.”

He rolled his hand into a fist around Alan's business card, first bending and then crumpling it. When it was completely hidden, a lick of blue fire squirted out from between his second and third fingers. He opened his hand again, and although little tendrils of smoke drifted up from the palm, there was no sign of the card—not even a smear of ash.

“Say-hey and abracadabra,” Gaunt said softly.

Myrtle Keeton went to the door of her husband's study for the third time that day and listened. When she got out of bed around nine o'clock that morning, Danforth had already been in there with the door locked. Now, at one in the afternoon, he was
still
in there with the door locked. When she asked him if he wanted some lunch, he told her in a muffled voice to go away, he was busy.

She raised her hand to knock again . . . and paused. She cocked her head slightly. A noise was coming from beyond the door—a grinding, rattling sound. It reminded her of the sounds her mother's cuckoo clock had made during the week before it broke down completely.

She knocked lightly. “Danforth?”

“Go away!” His voice was agitated, but she could not tell if the reason was excitement or fear.

“Danforth, are you all right?”

“Yes, dammit! Go away! I'll be out soon!”

Rattle and grind. Grind and rattle. It sounded like dirt in a dough-mixer. It made her a little afraid. She hoped Danforth wasn't having a nervous breakdown in there. He had been acting so
strange
lately.

“Danforth, would you like me to go down to the bakery and get some doughnuts?”

“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Yes! Doughnuts! Toilet paper! A nose job! Go anywhere! Get anything!
Just leave me alone!”

She stood a moment longer, troubled. She thought about knocking again and decided not to. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what Danforth was doing in his study. She was no longer sure she even wanted him to open the door.

She put on her shoes and her heavy fall coat—it was sunny but chilly—and went out to the car. She drove down to The Country Oven at the end of Main Street and got half a dozen doughnuts—honey-glazed for her, chocolate coconut for Danforth. She hoped they would cheer him up—a little chocolate always cheered
her
up.