“STOP!!!”
Trooper Morris bellowed, but his voice was drowned out in a volley of thunder which shook the entire street.
He pulled his gun, raised it skyward… but before he could fire, someone-God only knows who-shot him in the crotch with one of Leland Gaunt’s special sale items. Trooper Morris flew backward against the hood of his cruiser and rolled into the street, clutching the ruins of his sexual equipment and trying to scream.
It was impossible to tell just how many of the combatants had brought weapons purchased from Mr. Gaunt that day. Not many, and some of those who had been armed had lost the automatics in the confusion of trying to escape the stink-bombs. But at least four more shots were fired in rapid succession, shots that were largely overlooked in the confusion of shouting voices and booming thunder.
Len Milliken saw Jake Pulaski aiming one of the guns at Nan, who had allowed Betsy to get away and was now trying to choke Meade Rossignol. Len grabbed jake’s wrist and forced it upward into the lightning-dazzled sky a second before the gun went off.
Then he brought jake’s wrist down and snapped it over his knee like a stick of kindling wood. The gun clattered onto the wet street. jake began to howl. Len stepped back and said, “That’ll teach you to-” He got no further, for someone chose that moment to sink the blade of a pocket-knife into the nape of his neck, severing Len’s spinal cord at the brain-stem.
Other police-cars were arriving now, their blue lights swinging crazily in the rain-swept dark. The combatants did not heed the amplified yells to cease and desist. When the Troopers attempted to break things up, they found themselves sucked into the brawl instead.
Nan Roberts saw Father Brigham, his damned black shirt split right up the back. He was holding Rev. Rose by the nape of the neck with one hand. His other hand was rolled up Into a tight fist, and he was popping Rev. Rose repeatedly in the nose with it. His fist would slam home, the hand holding the nape of Rev. Rose’s neck would rock backward a little, and then it would haul Rev.
Rose back into position for the next blow.
Bellowing at the top of her lungs, ignoring the confused State Trooper who was telling her-almost begging her-to stop and stop right now, Nan slung away Meade Rossignol and launched herself at Father Brigham.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1
The onslaught of the storm slowed Alan down to a crawl in spite of his growing feeling that time had become vitally, bitterly important, and that if he didn’t get back to Castle Rock soon, he might just as well stay away forever. Much of the information he had really needed, it seemed to him now, had been in his mind all along, locked up behind a stout door. The door had a legend printed neatly on it-but not OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT or BOARD ROOM or even PRIVATE DO NOT ENTER.
The legend printed on the door in Alan’s mind had been THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
All he’d needed to unlock it was the right key… the key which Sean Rusk had given him. And what was behind the door?
Why, Needful Things. And its proprietor, Mr. Leland Gaunt.
Brian Rusk had bought a baseball card in Needful Things, and Brian was dead. Nettle Cobb had bought a lampshade in Needful Things, and she was dead, too. How many others in Castle Rock had gone to the well and bought poisoned water from the poison man? Norris had-a fishing rod. Polly had-a magic charm. Brian Rusk’s mother had-a pair of cheap sunglasses that had something to do with Elvis Presley. Even Ace Merrill had-an old book. Alan was willing to bet that Hugh Priest had also made a purchase… and Danforth Keeton…
How many others? How many?
He pulled up on the far side of the Tin Bridge just as a bolt of lightning stroked down from the sky and severed one of the old elms on the other side of Castle Stream. There was a huge electrical crackle and a wild streak of brilliance. Alan threw an arm across his eyes, but an afterimage was still printed on them in stark blue as the radio uttered a loud blurt of static and the elm toppled with ponderous grandeur into the stream.
He dropped his arm, then yelled as thunder bellowed directly overhead, sounding loud enough to crack the world. For a moment his dazzled eyes could make out nothing and he was afraid the tree might have fallen on the bridge, blocking his way into town. Then he saw it lying just upstream of the rusty old structure, buried in a loom of rapids. Alan put the cruiser in gear and made the crossing.
As he did, he could hear the wind, which was now blowing a gale, hooting in the struts and girders of the bridge. It was a creepy, lonely sound.
Rain pelted against the old station wagon’s windshield, turning everything beyond it into a wavering hallucination. As Alan came off the bridge and onto Lower Main Street at its intersection with Watermill Lane, the rain began to come so hard that the wipers, even on fast speed, were entirely useless. He unrolled his window, stuck his head out, and drove that way. He was instantly soaked.
The area around the Municipal Building was loaded with police cars and newsvans, but it also had a weird, deserted look, as if the people who belonged to all these vehicles had suddenly been teleported to the planet Neptune by evil aliens. Alan saw a few newspeople peering out from the shelter of their vans, and one State cop ran down the alley which led to the Municipal Building’s parking lot, rainwater spatting up from his shoes, but that was all.
Three blocks up, toward Castle Hill, an S.P. cruiser shot across Upper Main at high speed, heading west along Laurel Street. A moment later, another cruiser shot across Main. This one was on Birch Street and headed in the opposite direction from the first. It happened so fast-zip, zip-that it was like something you’d see in a comedy movie about bumbling police. Smokey and the Bandit, perhaps. Alan, however, saw nothing funny in it. It gave him a sense of action without purpose, a kind of panicky, helter-skelter movement. He was suddenly sure that Henry Payton had lost control of whatever was happening in Castle Rock tonight… if he’d ever had anything more than an illusion of control in the first place, that was.
He thought he could hear faint cries coming from the direction of Castle Hill. With the rain, thunder, and driving wind it was hard to tell for sure, but he did not think those cries were just imagination.
As if to prove this, a State Police car roared out of the alley next to the Municipal Building, flashing headlights and whirling domelights illuminating silvery streaks of rain, and headed in that direction. It nearly sideswiped an oversized WMTW news-wagon in the process.
Alan remembered feeling, earlier this week, that there was something badly out of joint in his little town-that things he could not see were going wrong and Castle Rock was trembling on the edge of some unthinkable disorder. And now the disorder had come, and it had all been planned by the man (Brian said Mr. Gaunt wasn’t really a man at all) Alan had never quite managed to see.
A scream rose in the night, high and drilling. It was followed by the sound of shattering glass… and then, from somewhere else, a gunshot and a burst of cracked, idiot laughter. Thunder banged in the sky like a pile of dropped boards.
But I have time now, Alan thought. Yes. Plenty of time. Mr.