She slammed it, turned the thumb-bolt, and went back out to the woodshed. The cupboard door was locked, of course. She went back into the house and stood in the kitchen for a minute. Already she was beginning to worry, beginning to think she had made a mistake and the cupboard door really wasn’t locked. Maybe she hadn’t tugged on the pull hard enough to be really absolutely one hundred per cent sure. it might only be stuck.
She went back to check it again, and while she was checking, the telephone began to ring. She hurried back into the house with the key to the armoire clutched in her sweaty right hand. She barked her shin on a footstool and cried out in pain.
By the time she got to the living room, the telephone had stopped again.
“I can’t go to work today,” she muttered. “I have to… to…
(stand guard) That was it. She had to stand guard.
She picked up the phone and dialled quickly before her mind could start to gnaw at itself again, the way Raider gnawed at his rawhide chewy toys.
“Hello?” Polly said. “This is You Sew and Sew.”
“Hi, Polly. It’s me.”
“Nettle? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, but I’m calling from home, Polly. My stomach is upset.”
By now this was no lie. “I wonder if I could have the day off. I know about vacuuming the upstairs… and the telephone man is coming… but…”
“That’s all right,” Polly said at once. “The phone man isn’t coming until two, and I meant to leave early today, anyway. My hands still hurt too much to work for long. I’ll let him in.”
“If you really need me, I could-”
“No, really,” Polly assured her warmly, and Nettle felt tears prick her eyes. Polly was so kind.
“Are they sharp pains, Nettle? Shall I call Dr. Van Allen for you.
“No-just kind of crampy. I’ll be all right. If I can come in this afternoon, I will.”
“Nonsense,” Polly said briskly. “You haven’t asked for a day off since you came to work for me. just crawl into bed and go back to sleep. Fair warning: if you try to come in, I’ll just send you home.”
“Thank you, Polly,” Nettle said. She was on the verge of tears.
“You’re very good to me.”
“YOU deserve goodness. I’ve got to go, Nettle-customers. Lie down. I’ll call this afternoon to see how you’re doing.”
“Thank you. “You’re More than welcome. Bye-bye.”
“Toodle-oo,” Nettle said, and hung up.
She went at once to the window and twitched the curtain aside.
The street was empty-for now. She went back into the shed, used the key to open the armoire, and took out the lampshade. A feeling of calm and ease settled over her as soon as she had it cradled in her arms. She took it into the kitchen, washed it in warm, soapy water, rinsed it, and dried it carefully.
She opened one of the kitchen drawers and removed her butcher knife. She took this and the lampshade back into the living room and sat down in the gloom. She sat that way all morning, bolt upright in her chair, the lampshade in her lap and the butcher knife clenched in her right hand.
The phone rang twice.
Nettle didn’t answer it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
Friday, the eleventh of October, was a banner day at Castle Rock’s newest shop, particularly as morning gave way to afternoon and people began to cash their paychecks. Money in the hand was an incentive to shop; so was the good word of mouth sent around by those who had stopped in on Wednesday. There were a number of people, of course, who believed the judgments of people crude enough to visit a new store on the very first day it was open could not be trusted, but they were a minority, and the small silver bell over the front door of Needful Things jingled prettily all day long.
More stock had been either unpacked or delivered since Wednesday.
It was hard for those interested in such things to believe there had been a delivery-no one had seen a truck-but it really didn’t matter much, one way or the other. There was a lot more merchandise in Needful Things on Friday; that was the important thing.
Dolls, for instance. And beautifully crafted wooden jigsaw puzzles, some of them double-sided. There was a unique chess set: the pieces were chunks of rock crys@ carved into African animals by some primitive but fabulously talented hand-loping giraffes for knights, rhinos with their heads combatively lowered for castles, jackals for pawns, lion kings, sinuous leopard queens. There was a necklace of black pearls which was clearly expensive-how expensive nobody quite dared to ask (at least not that day)-but their beauty made them almost painful to look at, and several visitors to Needful Things went home feeling melancholy and oddly distraught, with the image of that pearl necklace dancing in the darkness just behind their eyes, black on black. Nor were all of these women.
There was a pair of dancing jester-puppets. There was a music box, old and ornately carved-Mr. Gaunt said he was sure it played something unusual when it was opened, but he couldn’t remember just what, and it was locked shut. He reckoned a buyer would have to find someone to make a key for it; there were still a few oldtimers around, he said, who had such skill-a. He was asked a few times if the music box could be returned if the buyer did get the lid to open and discovered that the tune was not to his or her taste.
Mr. Gaunt smiled and pointed to a new sign on the wall. It read: I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES CAVEAT EMPTOR!
“What does that mean?” Lucille Dunham asked. Lucille was a waitress at Nan’s who had stopped in with her friend Rose Ellen Myers on her coffee break.
“It means that if you buy a pig in a poke, you keep the pig and he keeps your poke,” Rose Ellen said. She saw that Mr. Gaunt had overheard her (and she could have sworn she’d seen him on the other side of the shop only a moment before), and she blushed bright red.
Mr. Gaunt, however, only laughed. “That’s right,” he told her.
“That’s exactly what it means!”
An old long-barreled revolver in one case with a card in front of it which read NED BUNTLINE SPECIAL; a boy puppet with wooden red hair, freckles, and a fixed friendly grin (HOWDY DOODY PROTOTYPE, read the card); boxes of stationery, very nice but not remarkable; a selection of antique post-cards; pen-andpencil sets; linen handkerchiefs; stuffed animals. There was, it seemed, an item for every taste and-even though there was not a single price-tag in the entire store for every budget.
Mr. Gaunt did a fine business that day. Most of the items he sold were nice but in no way unique. He did, however, make a number of “special” deals, and all of these sales took place during those lulls when there was only a single customer in the store.
“When things get slow, I get restless,” he told Sally Ratcliffe, Brian Rusk’s speech teacher, with his friendly grin, “and when I get restless, I sometimes get reckless. Bad for the seller but awfully good for the buyer.”
Miss Ratcliffe was a devout member of Rev. Rose’s Baptist flock, had met her fiance Lester Pratt there, and in addition to her No Casino Nite button, she wore one which said I’M ONE OF THE SAVED! HOW ’BOUT You? The splinter labelled PETRIFIED WOOD FROM THE HOLY LAND caught her attention at once, and she did not object when Mr. Gaunt took it from its case and dropped it into her hand. She bought it for seventeen dollars and a promise to play a harmless little prank on Frank jewett, the principal at Castle Rock Middle School. She left the shop five minutes after she had entered, looking dreamy and abstracted.
Mr. Gaunt had offered to wrap her purchase for her, but Miss Ratcliffe refused, saying she wanted to hold it. Looking at her as she went out the door, you would have been hard-put to tell if her feet were on the floor or drifting just above it.