on a cushion of fire, then shattered into a hundred thousand jagged fragments.
In -the next instant the building itself blew outward in every direction, turning Lower Main Street into a hail of brick and glass where no living thing bigger than a cockroach could survive. Nineteen men and women were killed in the blast, five of them newspeople who had come to cover the escalating weirdness in Castle Rock and became part of the story instead.
State Police cars and news vehicles were thrown end over end through the air like Corgi toys. The yellow van which Mr. Gaunt had provided Ace and Buster cruised serenely up Main Street nine feet above the ground, wheels spinning, rear doors hanging by their mangled hinges, tools and timers spilling out the back. It banked to the left on a hot hurricane thermal and crash-landed in the front office of the Dostie Insurance Agency, snowplowing typewriters and file-cabinets before its mangled grille.
A shudder like an earthquake blundered through the ground.
11
Windows shattered all over town. Weathervanes, which had been pointing steadily northeast in the prevailing wind of the thunderstorm (which was now beginning to abate, as if embarrassed by the entrance of this avatar), began to whirl crazily. Several flew right off their spindles, and the next day one would be found buried deeply in the door of the Baptist Church, like a marauding Indian’s arrow.
On Castle Avenue, where the tide of battle was turning decisively in favor of the Catholics, the fighting stopped. Henry Payton stood by his cruiser, his drawn gun dangling by his right knee, and stared toward the fireball in the south. Blood trickled down his cheeks like tears. Rev. William Rose sat up, saw the monstrous glow on the horizon, and began to suspect that the end of the world had come, and that what he was looking at was Star Wormwood.
Father john Brigham wandered down to him in drunken loops and staggers. His nose was bent severely to the left and his mouth was a mass of blood. He considered punting Rev. Rose’s head like a football and helped him to his feet instead.
On Castle View, Andy Clutterbuck did not even look up. He sat on the front step of the Potter house, weeping and cradling his dead wife in his arms. He was still two years from the drunken plunge through the ice of Castle Lake which would kill him, but he was at the end of the last sober day of his life.
On Dell’s Lane, Sally Ratcliffe was in her bedroom closet with a small, squirming Conga-line of insects descending the side-seam of her dress. She had heard what had happened to Lester, understood that she had somehow been to blame (or believed she understood, and in the end it came to the same thing), and had hanged herself with the tie of her terrycloth bathrobe. One of her hands was thrust deep into the pocket of her dress. Clasped in this hand was a splinter of wood. it was black with age and spongy with rot.
The woodlice with which it had been infested were leaving in search of a new and more stable home. They reached the hem of Sally’s dress and began marching down one dangling leg toward the floor.
Bricks whistled through the air, turning the buildings some distance away from ground-zero into what looked like the aftermath of an artillery barrage. Those closer looked like cheese-graters, or collapsed entirely.
The night roared like a lion with a poisoned spear caught in its throat.
12
Seat Thomas, who was driving the cruiser Norris Ridgewick insisted they take, felt the car’s rear end rise gently, as if lifted by a giant’s hand. A moment later, a storm of bricks had engulfed the car.
Two or three punched through the trunk. One honked on the roof.
Another landed on the hood in a spray of brick-dust the color of old blood and slithered off the front.
“Jeezum, Norris, the whole town’s blowing up!” Seat cried shrilly.
“Just drive,” Norris said. He felt as if he were burning up; sweat stood out on his rosy, flushed face in big drops. He suspected that Ace had not wounded him mortally, that he had only winged him both times, but there was still something dreadfully wrong. He could feel sickness worming its way into his flesh, and his vision kept wanting to waver. He held grimly onto consciousness. As his fever grew, he became more and more certain that Alan needed HIM, and that if he was very lucky and very brave, he might yet be able to expiate the terrible wrong he had set in motion by slashing Hugh’s tires.
Ahead of him he saw a small group of figures in the street near the green awning of Needful Things. The column of fire towering out of the ruins of the Municipal Building lit the figures in tableau, like actors on a stage. He could see Alan’s station wagon, and Alan himself getting out of it. Facing him, his back turned to the cruiser in which Norris Ridgewick and Seaton Thomas were approaching, was a man with a gun. He was holding a woman in front of him like a shield. Norris couldn’t see enough of the woman to make out who she was, but the man who was holding her hostage was wearing the tattered remains of a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. He was the man who had tried to kill Norris at the Municipal Building, the man who had blown Buster Keeton’s brains out. Although he’d never met him, Norris was pretty sure he’d run afoul of town bad boy Ace Merrill.
“Jeezum-crow, Norris! That’s Alan! What’s going on now?”
Whoever the guy is, he can’t hear us coming, Norris thought.
Not with all the other noise. If Alan doesn’t look this way, doesn’t tip the shitbag offNorris’s service revolver was lying in his lap. He unrolled the passenger- side window of the cruiser and then raised the gun. Had it weighed a hundred pounds before? It weighed at least twice that now.
“Drive slow, Seat-slow as you can. And when I tap you with my foot, stop the car. Right away. Don’t bother to think things over. “With your foot! What do you mean, with your f-”
“Shut up, Seat,” Norris said with weary kindness. “Just remember what I said.”
Norris turned sideways, stuck his head and shoulders out the window, and clutched the bar which held the cruiser’s roof-flashers.
Slowly, laboriously, he pulled himself up and out until he was sitting in the window. His shoulder howled with agony, and fresh blood began to soak his shirt. Now they were less than thirty yards from the three people standing in the street, and he could aim directly along the roof at the man holding the woman. He couldn’t shoot, at least not yet, because he would be likely to hit her as well as him. But if either of them moved…
It was as close as Norris dared go. He tapped Seat’s leg with his foot. Seat brought the cruiser to a gentle halt in the brick-and rubble-littered street.
Move, Norris prayed. One of you please mov I don’t care which one, and it only has to be a little, but please, please move.
He did not notice the door of Needful Things open; his concentration was too fiercely focused on the man with the gun and the hostage. Nor did he see Mr. Leland Gaunt walk out of his shop and stand beneath the green awning.
13
“That money was mine, you bastard!” Ace shouted at Alan, “and if you want this bitch back with all her original equipment, you better tell me what the hell you did with it!”
Alan had stepped out of the station wagon. “Ace, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Wrong answer!” Ace screamed. “You know exactly what I’m talking about! POP’s money! In the cans! If you want the bitch, tell me what you did with it! This offer is good for a limited time only, you cocksucker!”
From the tail of his eye, Alan caught movement from below them on Main Street- It was a cruiser, and he thought it was a County unit, but he did not dare take a closer look. If Ace knew he was being blindsided, he would take polly’s life. He would do it in less time than it took to blink.
So instead he fixed his sight-line upon her face. Her dark eyes were weary and filled with pain… but they were not afraid.
Alan felt sanity begin to fill him again- It was funny stuff, sanity.
When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.
“He got it wrong,” he said quietly to Polly. “Gaunt got it wrong on the tape.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ace’s voice was Jagged, coked-up. He dug the muzzle of the automatic into Polly’s temple.
Of all of them, only Alan saw the door of Needful Things open stealthily, and he would not have seen it if he had not directed his gaze so stringently away from the cruiser which was creeping up the street. Only Alan saw-ghostly, at the very edge of vision-the tall figure that came out, a figure dressed not in a sport-coat or a smoking jacket but in a black broadcloth coat.
A travelling coat.
In one hand Mr. Gaunt held an old-fashioned valise, the sort in which a drummer or a travelling salesman might have carried his goods and samples in days of old. It was made of hyena-hide, and it was not still. It puffed and bulged, puffed and bulged below the long white fingers which gripped its handle. And from inside, like the sound of a distant wind or the ghostly cry one hears in hightension wires, came the faint sound of screams. Alan did not hear this horrid and unsettling sound with his ears; he seemed to hear it with his heart and in his mind.
Gaunt stood beneath the canopy where he could see both the approaching cruiser and the tableau by the station wagon, and in his eyes there was an expression of dawning irritation. perhaps even concern.
Alan thought: And he doesn’t know that I’ve seen him. I’m almost sure of that. Please, God, let me be right.
