“Yes, fine,” Polly said, but it was a lie she wasn’t even within shouting distance of fine.
Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. “You’re not well,” he said decisively. “Therefore I’m going to dispense with the small-talk.
The item which I wrote you about did come in. I’m going to give it to you and send you home.”
“Give it to me?”
“Oh, I’m not offering you a present,” he said as he went behind the cash register. “We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?”
She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding-was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn’t come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.
“This is the sort of item a vendor has to offer on trial-if he’s an ethical man, that is.” He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. “If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you-and I have to tell you that will probably be the case you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price.” He smiled at her. “And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you.”
She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?
He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside.
It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.
“This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramidsgosh, no!-but still very old. There’s something inside it.
Some sort of herb, I think, although I’m not sure.” He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.
“It’s called an azka, or perhaps an azakah,” Mr. Gaunt said.
“Either way, it’s an amulet which is supposed to ward off pain.”
Polly tried a smile. She wanted to be polite, but really. - she had come all the way down here for this? The thing didn’t even have any aesthetic value. It was ugly, not to put too fine a point on it.
“I really don’t think.
“I don’t, either,” he said, “but desperate situations often call for desperate measures. I assure you it is quite genuine… at least in the sense that it wasn’t made in Taiwan. It is an authentic Egyptian artifact-not quite a relic, but an artifact most certainly-from the period of the Later Decline. It comes with a certificate of provenance which identifies it as a tool of benka-litis, or white magic. I want you to take it and wear it. I suppose it sounds silly. Probably it is. But there are stranger things in heaven and earth than some of us dream Of, even in our wilder moments of philosophy.”
“Do you really believe that?” Polly asked.
“Yes. I’ve seen things in my time that make a healing medallion or amulet look perfectly ordinary.” A fugitive gleam flickered momentarily in his hazel eyes. “Many such things. The world’s odd corners are filled with fabulous junk, Polly. But never mind that; you are the issue here.
“Even the other day, when I suspect the pain was not nearly as bad as it is right now, I got a good idea of just how unpleasant your situation had become. I thought this little… item… might be worth a try. After all, what have you to lose? Nothing else you’ve tried has worked, has it?”
“I appreciate the thought, Mr. Gaunt, really I do, but-”
“Leland.
Please.”
“Yes, all right. I appreciate the thought, Leland, but I’m afraid I’m not superstitious.”
She looked up and saw his bright hazel eyes were fixed upon her.
“It doesn’t matter if you are or not, Polly… because this is.”
He wiggled his fingers. The azka bobbed gently at the end of its chain.
She opened her mouth again, but this time no words came out.
She found herself remembering a day last spring. Nettle had forgotten her copy of Inside View when she went home. Leafing through it idly, glancing at stories about werewolf babies in Cleveland and a geological formation on the moon that looked like the face of JFK, Polly had come upon an ad for something called The Prayer Dial of the Ancients. It was supposed to cure headaches, stomach aches, and arthritis.
The ad was dominated by a black-and-white drawing. It showed a fellow with a long beard and a wizard’s hat (either Nostradamus or Gandalf, Polly assumed) holding something that looked like a child’s pinwheel over the body of a man in a wheelchair. The pinwheel gadget was casting a cone of radiance over the invalid, and although the ad did not come right out and say so, the implication seemed to be that the guy would be dancing up a storm at the Copa in a night or two. It was ridiculous, of course, superstitious pap for people whose minds had wavered or perhaps even broken under a steady onslaught of pain and disability, but still…
She had sat looking at that ad for a long time, and, ridiculous as it was, she had almost called the 800 number for phone orders given at the bottom of the page. Because sooner or later'Sooner or later a person in pain should explore even the more questionable paths, if it’s possible those paths might lead to relief,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Isn’t that so?”
“I… I don’t.”
“Cold therapy… thermal gloves… even the radiation treatments… none of them have worked for you, have they?”
“How do you know about all that?”
“A good tradesman makes it his business to know the needs of his customers,” Mr. Gaunt said in his soft, hypnotic voice. He moved toward her, holding the silver chain out in a wide ring with the azka hanging at the bottom. She shrank from the long hands with their leathery nails.
“Fear not, dear lady. I’ll not touch the least hair upon your head.
Not if you’re calm… and remain quite still…”
And Polly did become calm. She did become still. She stood with her hands (still encased in the woolly mittens) crossed demurely in front of her, and allowed Mr. Gaunt to drop the silver chain over her head. He did it with the gentleness of a father turning down his daughter’s bridal veil. She felt far away from Mr. Gaunt, from Needful Things, from Castle Rock, even from herself. She felt like a woman standing high on some dusty plain and under an endless sky, hundreds of miles from any other human being.
The azka dropped against the zipper of her leather car-coat with a small clink.
“Put it inside your jacket. And when you get home, put it inside your blouse, as well. It must be worn next to the skin for maximum effect.”
“I can’t put it in my jacket,” Polly said in slow, dreaming tones.
“The zipper… I can’t pull down the zipper.”
“No? Try.”
So Polly stripped off one of the mittens and tried. To her great surprise, she found she was able to flex the thumb and first finger of her right hand just enough to grasp the zipper’s tab and pull it down.
“There, you see?”
The little silver ball fell against the front of her blouse. It seemed very heavy to her, and the feel of it was not precisely comfortable.
She wondered vaguely what was inside it, what had made that dusty slithery sound. Some sort of herb, he had said, but it hadn’t sounded like leaves or even powder to Polly. It had seemed to her that something in there had shifted on its own.
Mr. Gaunt seemed to understand her discomfort. “You’ll get used to it, and much sooner than you might think. Believe me, you will.”
Outside, thousands of miles away, she heard more sirens. They sounded like troubled spirits.
Mr. Gaunt turned away, and as his eyes left her face, Polly felt her concentration begin to return. She felt a little bewildered, but she also felt good. She felt as if she had just had a short but satisfying nap. Her sense of mixed discomfort and disquiet was gone.
“My hands still hurt,” she said, and this was true… but did they hurt as badly? It seemed to her there had been some relief, but that could be nothing more than suggestion-she had a feeling that Gaunt had imposed a kind of hypnosis on her in his determination to make her accept the azka. Or it might only be the warmth of the shop after the cold outside.
“I doubt very much if the promised effect is instantaneous,” Mr.
Gaunt said dryly. “Give it a chance, though-will you do that, Polly?”
She shrugged. “All right.”
After all, what did she have to lose? The ball was small enough so it would barely make a bulge under a blouse and a sweater. She wouldn’t have to answer any questions about it if no one knew it was there, and that would be just fine with her-Rosalie Drake would be curious, and Alan, who was about as superstitious as a tree-stump, would probably find it funny. As for Nettle… well, Nettle would probably be awed to silence if she knew Polly was wearing an honest-to-goodness magic charm, just like the ones they sold in her beloved Inside View.
“You shouldn’t take it off, not even in the shower,” Mr. Gaunt said. “There’s no need to. The ball is real silver, and won’t rust.”
“But if I do?”
He coughed gently into his hand, as if embarrassed. “Well, the beneficial effect of the azka is cumulative. The wearer is a little better today, a little better still tomorrow, and so on. That’s what I was told, at least.”
Told by whom? she wondered.
“If the azka is removed, however, the wearer reverts to his or her former painful state not slowly but at once, and then has to wait for days or perhaps weeks in order to regain the lost ground once the azka is put back on.”
Polly laughed a little. She couldn’t help it, and was relieved when Leland Gaunt joined her.
“I know how it sounds,” he said, “but I only want to help if I can. Do you believe that?”
“I do,” she said, “and I thank you.”
But as she allowed him to usher her from the shop, she found herself wondering about other things, too. There was the near trance-state she’d been in when he slipped the chain over her head, for instance. Then there was her strong dislike of being touched by him.
Those things were very much at odds with the feelings of friendship, regard, and compassion which he projected like an almost visible aura.
But had he mesmerized her somehow? That was a foolish idea… wasn’t it? She tried to remember exactly what she had felt like when they were discussing
