member of the Student Council and the Middle School Good Citizens’ League, the Brian Rusk who got nothing but I’s in deportment.
“She’ll kill somebody one of these days!” Mrs. Mislaburski called indignantly after Brian. “You just mark my words!”
Under his breath Brian whispered: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
He did indeed spend the rest of the day in bed. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have concerned Cora, perhaps enough to take Brian over to the Doc in the Box in Norway. Today, however, she hardly noticed that her son wasn’t feeling well. This was because of the wonderful sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her-she was absolutely entranced with them.
Brian got up around six o’clock, about fifteen minutes before his Pa came in from a day spent fishing on the lake with two friends.
He got himself a Pepsi from the fridge and stood by the stove, drinking it. He felt quite a bit better.
He felt as if he might have finally fulfilled his part of the deal he had made with Mr. Gaunt.
He had also decided that Mr. Gaunt did indeed know best.
9
Nettle Cobb, without the slightest premonition of the unpleasant surprise awaiting her at home, was in high good spirits as she walked down Main Street toward Needful Things. She had a strong intuition that, Sunday morning or not, the shop would be open, and she was not disappointed.
“Mrs. Cobb!” Leland Gaunt said as she came in. “How very nice to see you!”
“It’s nice to see you, too, Mr. Gaunt,” she said… and it was.
Mr. Gaunt came over, his hand out, but Nettle shrank from his touch. It was dreadful behavior, so impolite, but she simply couldn’t help herself. And Mr. Gaunt seemed to understand, God bless him.
He smiled and changed course, closing the door behind her instead.
He flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED with the speed of a professional gambler palming an ace.
“Sit down, Mrs. Cobb! Please! Sit down just came to t “Well, all right… but I tell you that Polly…
Polly is…” She felt strange, somehow. Not bad, exactly, but strange. Swimmy in the head. She sat down rather gracelessly in one of the plush chairs. Then Mr. Gaunt was standing before her, his eyes fixed on hers, and the world seemed to center upon him and grow still again.
“Polly isn’t feeling so well, is she?” Mr. Gaunt asked.
“That’s it,” Nettle agreed gratefully. “It’s her hands, you know.
She has…”
“Arthritis, yes, terrible, such a shame, shit happens, life’s a bitch and then you die, tough titty said the kitty. I know, Nettle.”
Mr.
Gaunt’s eyes were growing again. “But there’s no need for me to call her… or call on her, for that matter. Her hands are feeling better now.”
“Are they?” Nettle asked distantly.
“You betcha! They still hurt, of course, which is good, but they don’t hurt badly enough to keep her away, and that’s better stilldon’t you agree, Nettle?”
“Yes,” Nettle said faintly, but she had no idea of what she was agreeing to.
“You,” Mr. Gaunt said in his softest, most cheerful voice, “have got a big day ahead of you, Nettle.”
“I do?” It was news to her; she had been planning to spend the afternoon in her favorite living-room chair, knitting and watching TV with Raider at her feet.
“Yes. A very big day. So I want you to just sit there and rest for a moment while I go get something. Will you do that?”
“Yes…”
“Good. And close your eyes, why don’t you? Have a really good rest, Nettle!”
Nettle obediently closed her eyes. An unknown length of time later, Mr. Gaunt told her to open them again. She did, and felt a pang of disappointment. When people told you to close your eyes, sometimes they wanted to give you something nice. A present. She had hoped that, when she opened her eyes again, Mr. Gaunt might be holding another carnival glass lampshade, but all he had was a pad of paper. The sheets were small and pink. Each one was headed with the words
I I glass.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought it might be cam’va “I don’t think you’ll be needing any more carnival glass, Nettle.”
“No?” The pang of disappointment returned. It was stronger this time.
“No. Sad, but true. Still, I imagine you remember promising you’d do something for me.” Mr. Gaunt sat down next to her. “You do remember that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “You want me to play a trick on Buster. You want me to put some papers in his house.”
“That’s right, Nettle-very good. Do you still have the key I gave you?”
Slowly, like a woman in an underwater ballet, Nettle brought the key from the right-hand pocket of her coat. She held it up so Mr.
Gaunt could see it.
“That’s very good!” he told her warmly. “Now put it back, Nettle. Put it back where it’s safe.”
She did.
“Now. Here are the papers.” He put the pink pad in one of her hands. into the other he placed a Scotch-tape dispenser. Alarm bells were going off somewhere inside her now, but they were far away, hardly audible.
“I hope this won’t take long. I ought to go home soon. I have to feed Raider. He’s my little dog.”
“I know all about Raider,” said Mr. Gaunt, and offered Nettle a wide smile. “But I have a feeling that he doesn’t have much appetite today. I don’t think you need to worry about him pooping on the kitchen floor, either.”
“But-” He touched her lips with one of his long fingers, and she felt suddenly sick to her stomach.
“Don’t,” she whined, pressing back into her chair. “Don’t, it’s awful. “So they tell me,” Mr. Gaunt agreed. “So if you don’t want me to be awful to you, Nettle, you mustn’t ever say that awful little word to me.”
“What word?”
“But. I disapprove of that word. In fact, I think it’s fair to say I hate that word. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be no need for such a puling little word. I want you to say something else for me, Nettle-I want you to say some words that I love.
Words that I absolutely adore.”
“What words?”
“Mr. Gaunt knows best. Say that.”
“mr. Gaunt knows best,” she repeated, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she understood how absolutely and completely true they were.
“Mr. Gaunt always knows best.”
“mr. Gaunt always knows best.”
“Right! just like Father,” Mr. Gaunt said, and then laughed hideously. It was a sound like plates of rock moving deep in the earth, and the color of his eyes shifted rapidly from b!ue to green to brown to black when he did it. “Now, Nettle listen carefully.
You have this one little errand to do for me and then you can go home. Do you understand?”
Nettle understood.
And she listened very carefully.
CHAPTER TEN
1
South Paris is a small and squalid milltown eighteen miles northeast of Castle Rock. It is not the only jerkwater Maine town named after a European city or country; there is a Madrid (the natives pronounce it Mad-drid), a Sweden, an Etna, a Calais (pronounced so it rhymes with Dallas), a Cambridge, and a Frankfort. Someone may know how or why so many wide places in the road ended up with such an exotic variety of names, but I do not.
What I do know is that about twenty years ago a very good French chef decided to move out of New York and open his own restaurant in Maine’s Lakes Region, and that he further decided there could be no better place for such a venture than a town named South Paris. Not even the stench of the tanning mills could dissuade him. The result was an eating establishment called Maurice.
