“Just stop it!”
That’s right, Leland Gaunt said. Besides, what’s the big deal?
It’s only a harmless little joke. And if something serious were to come of itit won’t, o f course, hut just supposing, for the sake of argument, that it did-whose fault would that be?
“Alan’s,” she whispered. Her eyes rolled nervously in their sockets and her hands clenched and unclenched nervously between her breasts. “If he were here to talk to… if he hadn’t cut himself off from me by snooping around in things that are none of his business…
The little voice tried to speak up again, but Leland Gaunt cut it off before it could say a word.
Right again, Gaunt said. As to what you’re doing here, Polly, the answer to that is simple enough: you’re Paying. That’s what you’re doing, and that’s all you’re doing. Ghosts have nothing to do with it.
And remember this, because it is the simplest, most wonderful aspect of commerce: once an item is paid for, it belongs to you. You didn’t expect such a wonderful thing to come cheap, did you? But when you finish paying, it’s yours. You have clear title to the thing you have paid for. Now will you stand here listening to those oldfrightened voices all day, or will you do what you came to do?
Polly opened her eyes again. The azka hung movelessly at the end of its chain. If it had moved-and she was no longer sure it had-it had stopped now. The house was just a house, empty too long and showing the inevitable signs of neglect. The windows were not eyes, but simply holes rendered glassless by adventuresome boys with rocks. If she had heard something in the barn-and she was no longer sure she had-it had only been the sound of a board expanding in the unseasonable October heat.
Her parents were dead. Her sweet little boy was dead. And the dog which had ruled this dooryard so terribly and completely for three summer days and nights eleven years ago was dead.
There were no ghosts.
“Not even me,” she said, and began to walk around the barn.
3
When you go around to the back of the barn, Mr. Gaunt had said, you’ll see the remains of an old trailer. She did; a silver-sided Air-Flow, almost obscured by goldenrod and high tangles of late sunflowers.
You’ll see a large flat rock at the left end of the trailer.
I She found it easily. It was as large as a garden paving stone.
Move the rock and dig. About two feet down you’llfind a Crisco can.
She tossed the rock aside and dug. Less than five minutes after she started, the shovel’s blade clunked on the can. She discarded the shovel and dug into the loose earth with her fingers, breaking the light webwork of roots with her fingers. A minute later she was holdin the Crisco can. It was rusty but intact. The rotting label 9
came loose and she saw a recipe for Pineapple Surprise Cake on the back (the list of ingredients was mostly obscured by a black blotch of mold), along with a Bisquick coupon that had expired in 1969. She got her fingers under the lid of the can and pried it loose.
The whiff of air that escaped made her wince and draw her head back for a moment. That voice tried one last time to ask what she was doing here, but Polly shut it out.
She looked into the can and saw what Mr. Gaunt had told her she would see: a bundle of Gold Bond trading stamps and several fading photographs of a woman having sexual intercourse with a collie dog.
She took these things out, stuffed them into her hip pocket, I and then wiped her fingers briskly on the leg of her jeans. She would wash her hands as soon as she could, she promised herself.
Touching these things which had lain so long under the earth made her feel unclean.
From her other pocket she took a sealed business envelope.
Typed on the front in capital letters was this:
A MESSAGE FOR THE INTREPID TREASURE-HUNTER.
Polly put the envelope n the can, pressed the cover back down, and dropped it into the hole again. She used the shovel to fill in the hole, working quickly and carelessly. All she wanted right now was to get the hell out of here.
When she was done, she walked away fast. The shovel she slung into the high weeds. She had no intention of taking it back to the barn, no matter how mundane the explanation of the sound she had heard might be.
When she reached her car, she opened first the passenger door and then the glove compartment. She pawed through the litter of paper inside until she found an old book of matches. It,took her four tries to produce one small flame. The pain had almost entirely left her hands, but they were shaking so badly that she struck the first three much too hard, bending the paper heads uselessly to the side.
When the fourth flared alight, she held it between two fingers of her right hand, the flame almost invisible in the hot afternoon sunlight, and took the matted pile of trading stamps and dirty pictures from her jeans pocket. She touched the flame to the bundle and held it there until she was sure it had caught. Then she cast the match aside and dipped the papers down to produce the maximum draft. The woman was malnourished and hollow-eyed. The dog looked mangy and just smart enough to be embarrassed. It was a relief to watch the surface of the one photograph she could see bubble and turn brown. When the pictures began to curl up, she dropped the flaming bundle into the dirt where a woman had once beaten another dog, this one a Saint Bernard, to death with a baseball bat.
The flames flared. The little pile of stamps and photos quickly crumpled to black ash. The flames guttered, went out… and at the moment they did, a sudden gust of wind blew through the stillness of the day, breaking the clot of ash up into flakes. They whirled upward in a funnel which Polly followed with eyes that had gone suddenly wide and frightened. Where, exactly, had that freak gust of wind come from?
Oh, please! Can’t you stop being so damnedAt that moment the growling sound, low, like an idling outboard motor, rose from the hot, dark maw of the barn again. It wasn’t her imagination and it wasn’t a creaking board.
It was a dog.
Polly looked that way, frightened, and saw two sunken red circles of light peering out at her from the darkness.
She ran around the car, bumping her hip painfully against the right side of the hood in her hurry, got in, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. She turned the ignition key. The engine cranked over… but did not start.
No one knows where I am, she realized. No one but Mr. Gaunt… and he wouldn’t tell.
For a moment she imagined herself trapped out here, the way Donna Trenton and her son had been trapped. Then the engine burst into life and she backed out of the driveway so fast she almost ran her car into the ditch on the far side of the road. She dropped the transmission into drive and headed back to town as fast as she dared to go.
She had forgotten all about washing her hands.
4
Ace Merrill rolled out of bed around the same time that Brian Rusk was blowing his head off thirty miles away.
He went into the bathroom, shucking out of his dirty skivvies as he walked, and urinated for an hour or two. He raised one arm and sniffed his pit. He looked at the shower and decided against it. He had a big day ahead of him. The shower could wait.
He left the bathroom without bothering to flush-if it’s yellow, let it mellow was an integral part of Ace’s philosophy-and went directly to the bureau, where the last of Mr. Gaunt’s blow was laid out on a shaving mirror. It was great stuff-easy on the nose, hot in the head. It was also almost gone. Ace had needed a lot of goPower last night, just as Mr. Gaunt had said, but he had a pretty good idea there was more where this had come from.
Ace used the edge of his driver’s license to shape a couple of lines. He snorted them with a rolled-up five-dollar bill, and something that felt like a Shrike missile went off in his head.