street with a crunch.
“Norris, you been shot-”
“Of course I’ve been shot!” Norris screamed. Bloody froth flew from his lips. “Now get me in the cruiser!”
“It’s a bad idea, Norris-”
“No It’s not,” Norris said grimly. He turned his head and spat blood. “It’s the only idea. Now come on.
Help me.”
Seat Thomas began to walk him toward Unit 2.
9
If Alan hadn’t glanced into his rearview mirror before backing out into the street, he would have run Polly down, completing the evening by crushing the woman he loved under the rear wheels of his old station wagon. He did not recognize her; she was only a shape behind his car, a woman-shape outlined against the cauldron of flames on the other side of the street. He jammed on the brakes, and a moment later she was hammering at his window.
Ignoring her, Alan began to back up again. He had no time for the town’s problems tonight; he had his own. Let them slaughter each other like stupid animals, if that was what they wanted to do.
He was going to Mechanic Falls. He was going to get the man who had killed his wife and son in revenge for a piddling four years in the Shank.
Polly grabbed his doorhandle and was half-pulled, half-dragged, out into the debris-strewn street. She punched down on the button below the handle, her hand shrieking with pain, and the door flew open with her clinging desperately to it and her feet dragging as Alan made his reverse turn. The nose of the station wagon was pointing down Main Street. In his grief and fury, Alan had totally forgotten that there was no bridge to cross down that way anymore.
“Alan!” she screamed. “Alan, stop!”
It got through. Somehow it got through in spite of the rain, the thunder, the wind, and the heavy, hungry crackle of the fire. In spite of his compulsion.
He looked at her, and Polly’s heart broke at the expression in his eyes. Alan wore the look of a man floating in the gut of a nightmare.
“Polly?” he asked distantly.
“Alan, you have to stop!”
She wanted to let go of the doorhandle-her hands were agony-but she was afraid that if she did, he would simply drive away and leave her there in the middle of Main Street.
No… she knew he would.
“Polly, I have to go. I’m sorry you’re mad at me that you think I did something-but we’ll sort it out. Only I have to g-”
“I’m not mad at you anymore, Alan. I know it wasn’t you. it was him, playing us off against each other, like he has just about everyone else in Castle Rock. Because that’s what he does. Do you understand, Alan? Are you hearing me? Because that is what he does!
Now stop! Turn off the goddamned engine and listen to me!”
“I have to go, Polly,” he said. His own voice seemed to be coming to him from far away. On the radio, perhaps. “But I’ll be ha-”
“No you won’t!” she cried. Suddenly she was furious with himfurious at all of them, all the greedy, frightened, angry, acquisitive people in this town, herself included. “No you won’t, because if you leave now, there won’t be a goddam thing to come back TO!”
The video-game parlor blew up. Debris stormed around Alan’s car, parked in the middle of Main Street. Alan’s talented right hand stole over, picked up the Tastee-Munch can, as if for comfort, and held it on his lap.
Polly took no notice of the explosion; she stared at Alan with her dark, pain-filled eyes.
“Polly-”
“Look!” she shouted suddenly, a.-id tore open the front of her blouse. Rainwater struck the swells of her breasts and gleamed in the hollow of her throat. “Look, I took it off-the charm! it’s gone!
Now take yours off, Alan! If you’re a man, take yours Off!”
He was having trouble understanding her from the depths of whatever nightmare it was which held him, the nightmare Mr. Gaunt had spun around him like a poisonous cocoon… and in a sudden flash of insight she understood what that nightmare was. What it must be.
“Did he tell you what happened to Annie and Todd?” she asked softly.
His head rocked back as if she had slapped him, and Polly knew she had hit the mark.
“Of course he did. What’s the one thing in all the world, the one useless thing, that you want so badly that you get it mixed up with needing it? That’s your charm, Alan-that’s what he’s put around your neck.”
She let go of the doorhandle and thrust both of her arms into the car. The glow from the domelight fell on them. The flesh was a dark, liverish red. Her arms were so badly swollen that her elbows were becoming puffy dimples.
“There was a spider inside of mine,” she said softly.
“’Hinkypinky-spider, crawling up the spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out.’Just a little spider. But it grew. It ate my pain and it grew. This is what it did before I killed it and took my pain back. I wanted so badly for the pain to be gone, Alan. That was what I wanted, but I don’t need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.”
“Polly'Of course it has poisoned me,” she continued thoughtfully, “and I think the poison may kill me if something isn’t done. But why not? It’s fair. Hard, but fair. I bought the poison when I bought the charm. He has sold a lot of charms in his nasty little shop this last week. The bastard works fast, I’ll give him that much.
Hinkypinky-spider, crawling up the spout. That’s what was in mine.
What’s inside yours? Annie and Todd, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“Polly, Ace Merrill killed my wife! He killed Todd! He-”
“No!” she screamed, and seized his face in her throbbing hands.
“Listen to me! Understand me! Alan, it’s not just your life, can’t you see? He makes you buy back your own sickness, and he makes you pay double! Don’t you understand that yet? Don’t you get it?”
He stared at her, mouth agape… and then, slowly, his mouth closed. A sudden look of puzzled surprise settled on his face.
“Wait,” he said. “Something was wrong. Something was wrong in the tape he left me. I can’t quite…
“You can, Alan! Whatever the bastard sold you, it was wrong, just like the name on the letter he left me was wrong.”
He was really hearing her for the first time. “What letter?”
“It’s not important now-if there’s a later, I’ll tell you then.
10
The point is, he oversteps. I think he always oversteps. He’s so stuffed with pride it’s a wonder he doesn’t explode. Alan, please try to understand: Annie is dead, Todd is dead, and if you go out chasing Ace Merrill while the town is burning down around your ears-” A hand appeared over Polly’s shoulder. A forearm encircled her neck and jerked her roughly backward. Suddenly Ace Merrill was standing behind her, holding her, pointing a gun at her, and grinning over her shoulder at Alan.
“Speak of the devil, lady,” Ace said, and overhead -thunder cracked across the sky.
Frank jewett and his good old “friend” George T. Nelson had been facing each other on the courthouse steps like a pair of strange bespectacled gunslingers for almost four minutes now, their nerves twanging like violin strings tuned into the ultimate octave.
“Yig!” said Frank. His hand grabbed for the automatic pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants.
“Awk!” said George T. Nelson, and grabbed for his own.
They drew with identical feverish grins-grins that looked like big, soundless screams-and threw down. Their fingers pressed the triggers. The two reports overlapped so perfectly that they sounded like one. Lightning flashed as the two bullets flew… and nicked each other in mid-flight, deflecting just enough to miss what should have been a pair of point-blank targets.
Frank jewett felt a puff of air beside his left temple.
George T. Nelson felt a sting on the right side of his neck.
They stared at each other unbelievingly over the smoking guns.
“Huh?” said George T. Nelson.
“Wha?” said Frank Jewett.
They began to grin identical, unbelieving grins. George T. Nelson took a hesitant step up toward Frank; Frank took a hesitant step down toward George. In another moment or two they might have been embracing, their quarrel dwarfed by those two small puffs of eternity… but then the Municipal Building blew up with a roar that seemed to split the world in two, vaporizing them both where they stood.
That final explosion dwarfed all the others. Ace and Buster had planted forty sticks of dynamite in two clusters of twenty at the Municipal Building. One of these bombs had been left sitting on the judge’s chair in the courtroom. Buster had insisted that they place the other on Amanda Williams’s desk in the Selectmen’s Wing.
“Women have no business in politics, anyway,” Buster explained to Ace.
The sound of the explosion was shattering, and for a moment every window of the town’s biggest building was filled with supernatural violet-orange light. Then the fire lashed out through the windows, through the doors, through the vents and grilles, like merciless, muscular arms. The slate roof lifted off intact like some strange gabled spaceship, rose
