32
Sean Rusk stood in the kitchen doorway of his house, looking anxiously out at the garage. Five minutes before, his older brother had gone out there Sean had been looking out of his bedroom window and had just happened to see him. Brian had been holding something in one hand. The distance had been too great for Sean to see what it was, but he didn’t need to see. He knew. It was the new baseball card, the one Brian kept creeping upstairs to look at.
Brian didn’t know Sean knew about that card, but Sean did. He even knew who was on it, because he’d gotten home much earlier from school today than Brian, and he had sneaked into Brian’s room to look at it. He didn’t have the slightest idea why Brian cared about it so much; it was old, dirty, dog-eared, and faded. Also, the player was somebody Sean had never heard of-a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Sammy Koberg, lifetime record one win, three losses. The guy had never even spent a whole year in the majors. Why would Brian care about a worthless card like that?
Sean didn’t know. He only knew two things for sure: Brian did care, and the way Brian had been acting for the last week or so was scary. It was like those TV ads you saw about kids on drugs. But Brian wouldn’t use drugs… would he?
Something about Brian’s face when he went out to the garage had scared Sean so badly he had gone to tell his mother. He wasn’t sure exactly what to say, and it turned out not to matter because he didn’t get a chance to say anything. She was mooning around in the bedroom, wearing her bathrobe and those stupid sunglasses from the new store downtown.
“Mom, Brian’s-” he began, and that was as far as he got.
“Go away, Sean. Mommy’s busy right now.”
“But Mom-”
“Go away, I said!”
And before he had a chance to go on his own, he’d found himself hustled unceremoniously out of the bedroom. Her bathrobe fell open as she pushed him, and before he could look away, he saw that she was wearing nothing beneath it, not even a nightgown.
She had slammed the door behind him. And locked it.
Now he stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting anxiously for Brian to come back out of the garage… but Brian didn’t.
His unease had grown in some stealthy way until it was barely controlled terror. Sean went out the kitchen door, trotted through the breezeway, and entered the garage.
It was dark and oily-smelling and explosively hot inside. For a moment he didn’t see his brother in the shadows and thought he must have gone out through the back door into the yard. Then his eyes adjusted, and he uttered a small, whimpery gasp.
Brian was sitting against the rear wall, next to the Lawnboy. He had gotten Daddy’s rifle. The butt was propped on the floor. The muzzle was pointed at his own face. Brian was supporting the barrel with one hand while the other clutched the dirty old baseball card which had somehow gained such a hold over his life this last week.
“Brian!” Sean cried. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t come any closer, Sean, you’ll get the mess on you.”
“Brian, don’t!” Sean cried, beginning to weep. “Don’t be such a wussy! You’re… you’re scaring me!”
“I want you to promise me something,” Brian said. He had taken off his socks and sneakers, and now he wriggled one of his big toes inside the Remington’s trigger-guard.
Sean felt his crotch grow wet and warm. He had never been so scared in his life. “Brian, please! Pleeease!”
“I want you to promise me you’ll never go to the new store,” Brian said. “Do you hear me?” Sean took a step toward his brother. Brian’s toe tightened on the trigger of the rifle. “No!” Sean screamed, drawing back at once. “I mean yes! Yes!” Brian let the barrel drop a little when he saw his brother retreat. His toe relaxed a bit. “Promise me.”
“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.
