“Yes! Anything you want! Only don’t do that! Don’t… don’t tease me any more, Bri! Let’s go in and watch The Transformers! No… you pick! Anything you want! Even Wapner! We can watch
Wapner if you want to! All week! All month! I’ll watch with you! Only stop scaring me, Brian, please stop scaring me!” Brian Rusk might not have heard. His eyes seemed to float in his distant, serene face. “Never go there,” he said. “Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he’s really not a man, Sean. He’s not a man at all. Swear to me you’ll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells.”
“I swear! I swear!” Sean babbled. “I swear on Mommy’s name!”
“No,” Brian said, “you can’t do that, because he got her, too. Swear on your own name, Sean. Swear it on your very own name.”
“I do!” Sean cried out in the hot, dim garage. He held his hands out imploringly to his brother. “I really do, I swear on my very own name! Now please put the gun down, Brl-”
“I love you, baby brother.” He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. “Sandy Koufax sucks,” Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Sean’s drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.
33
Leland Gaunt stood at his shop window, looking out on Main Street and smiling gently. The sound of the shot from up on Ford Street was faint, but his ears were sharp and he heard it.
His smile broadened a little. He took down the sign in the window, the one which said he was open by appointment only, and put up a new one. This one read
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
“We’re having fun now,” Leland Gaunt said to no one at all. “Yessirree.” Polly Chalmers knew nothing of these things. While Castle Rock was bearing the first real fruits of Mr. Gaunt’s labors, she was out at the end of Town Road #3, at the old Camber place. She had gone there as soon as she had finished her conversation with Alan. Finished it? she thought. Oh my dear, that’s much too civilized. After you hung up on him-isn’t that what you mean? All right, she agreed. After I hung up on him. But he went behind my back. And when I called him on it, he got all flustered and then lied about it. He lied about it. I happen to think that behavior like that deserves an uncivilized response.
Something stirred uneasily in her at this, something which might have spoken if she had given it time and room, but she gave it neither.
She wanted no dissenting voices; did not, in fact, want to think about her last conversation with Alan Pangborn at all. She just wanted to take care of her business out here at the end of Town Road #3 and then go back home. Once she was there, she intended to take a cool bath and then go to bed for twelve or sixteen hours.
That deep voice managed just five words: But, Polly… have you thought. No. She hadn’t. She supposed she would have to think in time, but now was too soon. When the thinking began, the hurting would begin, too. For now she only wanted to take care of business… and not think at all.
The Camber place was spooky… reputed by some to be haunted.
Not so many years ago, two people-a small boy and Sheriff George Bannerman-had died in the dooryard of this house.
Two others, Gary Pervier and Joe Camber himself, had died just down the hill. Polly parked her car over the place where a woman named Donna Trenton had once made the fatal mistake of parking her Ford Pinto, and got out. The azka swung back and fotth between her breasts as she did.
She looked around uneasily for a moment at the sagging porch, the paintless walls overrun by climbing ivy, the windows which were mostly broken and stared blindly back at her. Crickets sang their stupid songs in the grass, and the hot sun beat down as it had on those terrible days when Donna Trenton had fought for her life here, and for the life of her son.
What am I doing here? Polly thought. What in God’s name am I doing here?
But she knew, and it had nothing to do with Alan Pangborn or Kelton or the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare. This little field-trip had nothing to do with love. It had to do with pain.
That was all… but that was enough.
There was something inside the small silver charm. Something that was alive. If she did not live up to her side of the bargain she had made with Leland Gaunt, it would die. She didn’t know if she could stand to be tumbled back down into the horrible, grinding pain to which she had awakened on Sunday morning. If she had to face a lifetime of such pain, she thought she would kill herself.
“And it’s not Alan,” she whispered as she walked toward the barn with its gaping doorway and its ominous swaybacked roof. “He said he wouldn’t raise a hand against him.”
Why do you even care? that worrisome voice whispered.
She cared because she didn’t want to hurt Alan. She was angry at him, yes-furious, in fact-but that didn’t mean she had to stoop to his level, that she had to treat him as shabbily he had treated her.
But, Polly… have you thought. No. No!
She was going to play a trick on Ace Merrill, and she didn’t care about Ace at all-had never even met him, only knew him by reputation.
The trick was on Ace, but…
But Alan, who had sent Ace Merrill away to Shawshank, came into it someplace. Her heart told her so.
And could she back out of this? Could she, even if she wanted to?
Now it was Kelton, as well. Mr. Gaunt hadn’t exactly told her that the news of what had happened to her son would end up all over town unless she did what he told her to do… but he had hinted as much.
She couldn’t bear for that to happen.
Is a woman not entitled to her pride? When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?
Yes. And yes. And yes.
Mr. Gaunt had told her she’d find the only tool she would need in the barn; now Polly began to walk slowly in that direction.
Go where ye list, but go there alive, Trisha, Aunt Evvie had told her. Don’t be no ghost.
But now, stepping into the Camber barn through doors which hung gaping and frozen on their rusty tracks, she felt like a ghost.
She had never felt more like a ghost in her life. The azka moved between her breasts… on its own now. Something inside. Something alive. She didn’t like it, but she liked the idea of what would happen if that thing died even less.
She would do what Mr. Gaunt had told her to do, at least this once, cut all her ties with Alan Pangborn (it had been a mistake to ever begin with him, she saw that now, saw it clearly), and keep her past her own. Why not?
After all, it was such a little thing.
2
The shovel was exactly where he had told her it would be, leaning against one wall in a dusty shaft of sunlight. She took hold of its smooth, worn handle.
Suddenly she seemed to hear a low, purring growl from the deep shadows of the barn, as if the rabid Saint Bernard which had killed Big George Bannerman and caused the death of Tad Trenton were still here, back from the dead and meaner than ever.
Gooseflesh danced up her arms and Polly left the barn in a hurry. The dooryard was not exactly cheery-not with that empty house glaring sullenly at her-but it was better than the barn.
What am I doing here? her mind asked again, woefully, and it was Aunt Evvie’s voice that came back: Going ghost. That’s what you’re doing. You’re going ghost.
Polly squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop it!” she whispered fiercely.