Considering the nature of her errand, this seemed a reasonable precaution. She needn’t have worried. The Tiger didn’t close until one in the a.m and Henry rarely rose much before that same hour in the p.m. All the shades, both upstairs and down, were drawn. His car, a perfectly maintained 1960 Thunderbird that was his pride and joy, stood in the driveway.
Myra was wearing a pair of jeans and one of her husband’s blue work-shirts. The tail of the shirt was out and hung almost to her knees. It concealed the belt she wore beneath, and the scabbard hanging from the belt. Chuck Evans was a collector of World War II memorabilia (and, although she did not know it, he had already made a purchase of his own in this area at the town’s new shop), and there was a Japanese bayonet in the scabbard. Myra had taken it half an hour ago from the wall of Chuck’s basement den. It bumped solidly against her right thigh at every step.
She was very anxious to get this job done, so she could get back to the picture of Elvis. Holding the picture, she had discovered, produced a kind of story. It wasn’t a real story, but in most waysall ways, actually-she considered it better than a real story. Act I was The Concert, where The King pulled her up on stage to dance with him.
Act II was The Green Room After The Show, and Act III was In the Limo- One of Elvis’s Memphis guys was driving the limo, and The King didn’t even bother to put up the black glass between the driver and them before doing the most outrageous and delicious things to her in the back seat as they drove to the airport.
Act IV was titled On the Plane. In this act they were in the Lisa Marie, Elvis’s Convair jet… in the big double bed behind the partition at the back of the cabin, to be exact. That was the act Myra had been enjoying yesterday and this morning: cruising at thirty-two thousand feet in the Lisa Marie, cruising in bed with The King.
She wouldn’t have minded staying there with him forever, but she knew that she wouldn’t. They were bound for Act V: Graceland.
Once they were there, things could only get better.
But she had this little piece of business to take care of first.
She had been lying in bed this morning after her husband left, naked except for her garter-belt (The King had been very clear in his desire for Myra to leave that on), the picture clasped tightly in her hands, moaning and writhing slowly on the sheets. And then, suddenly, the double bed was gone. The whisper-drone of the Lisa Marie’s engines was gone. The smell of The King’s English Leather was gone.
In the place of these wonderful things was Mr. Gaunt’s face… only he no longer looked as he did in his shop. The skin on his face looked blistered, seared with some fabulous secret heat. It pulsed and writhed, as if there were things beneath, struggling to get out. And when he smiled, his big square teeth had become a double row of fangs.
“It’s time, Myra,” Mr. Gaunt had said. “I want to be with Elvis,” she whined. “I’ll do it, but not right now-please, not right now.”
“Yes, right now. You promised, and you’re going to make good on your promise. You’ll be very sorry if you don’t, Myra.”
She had heard a brittle cracking. She looked down and saw with horror that a ’agged crack now split the glass over The King’s face.
“No!” she cried. “No, don’t do that!”
“I’m not doing it,” Mr. Gaunt had responded with a laugh.
“You’re doing it. You’re doing it by being a silly, lazy little cuntThis is America, Myra, where only whores do business in bed. In America respectable people have to get out of bed and earn the things they need, or lose them forever. I think you forgot that. Of course, I can always find somebody else to play that little trick on Mr. Beaufort, but as for your beautiful affaire de coeur with The King-” Another crack raced like a silver lightning-bolt across the glass covering the picture. And the face beneath it, she observed with mounting horror, was growing old and wrinkled and raddled as the corrupting air seeped in and went to work on it.
“No! I’ll do it! I’ll do it right now! I’m getting up right now, see?
Only make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!”
Myra had leaped to the floor with the speed of a woman who has discovered she is sharing her bed with a nest of scorpions.
“When you keep your promise, Myra,” Mr. Gaunt said. Now he was speaking from some deep sunken hollow in her mind. “You know what to do, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know!” Myra looked despairingly at the picture-the image of an old, ill man, his face puffy from years of excess and indulgence.
The hand which held the microphone was a vulture’s talon.
“When you come back with your mission accomplished,” Mr.
Gaunt said, “the picture will be fine. Only don’t let anyone see you, Myra. If anyone sees you, you’ll never see him again.”
“I won’t!” she babbled. “I swear I won’t!”
And now, as she reached Henry Beaufort’s house, she remembered that admonition. She looked around to make sure no one was coming along the road. It was deserted in both directions. A crow cawed somnolently in someone’s October-barren field. There was no other sound. The day seemed to throb like a living thing, and the land lay stunned within the slow beat of its unseasonable heart.
Myra walked up the driveway, pulling up the tail of the blue shirt, feeling to make sure of the scabbard and the bayonet inside it.
Sweat ran, trickling and itching, down the center of her back and under her bra. Although she didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed it if told, she had achieved a momentary beauty in the rural stillness.
Her vague, unthoughtful face had filled, at least during these moments, with a deep purpose and determination which had never been there before. Her cheekbones were clearly defined for the first time since high school, when she had decided her mission in life was to eat every Yodel and Ding-Dong and Hoodsie Rocket in the world. During the last four days or so, she had been much too busy having progressively weirder and weirder sex with The King to think much about eating. Her hair, which usually hung around her face in a lank, floppy rug, was tied back in a tight little horsetail, exposing her brow. Perhaps shocked by the sudden overdose of hormones and the equally sudden cutback in sugar consumption after years of daily overdoses, most of the pimples that had flared on her face like uneasy volcanoes ever since she was twelve had gone into remission. Even more remarkable were her eyes-wide, blue, almost feral. They were not the eyes of Myra Evans, but of some jungle beast that might turn vicious at any moment.
She reached Henry’s car. Now something was coming along 117-an old, rattling farm-truck headed for town. Myra slipped around to the front of the T-Bird and crouched behind its grille until the truck was gone. Then she stood up again. From the breast pocket of her shirt she took a folded sheet of paper. She opened it, smoothed it carefully, and then stuck it under one of the Bird’s windshield wipers so the brief message written there showed clearly.
DON’T YOU EVER CUT ME OFF AND THEN KEEP MY CAR KEYS YOU DAMNED FROG IT READ. it was time for the bayonet.
She took another quick glance around, but the only thing moving in the whole hot daylight world was a single crow, perhaps the one which had called before. It flapped down to the top of a telephone pole directly across from the driveway and seemed to watch her.
Myra took the bayonet out, gripped it tightly in both hands, stooped, and rammed it up to the hilt in the whitewall on the driver’s-side front. Her face was pulled back in a wincing snarl, anticipating a loud bang, but there was only a sudden breathless hooooosh!-the sound a big man might make after a sucker-punch to the gut. The T-Bird settled appreciably to the left. Myra yanked the bayonet, tearing the hole wider, grateful Chuck liked to keep his toys sharp.
When she had cut a ragged rubber smile in the rapidly deflating tire, she went around to the one on the passenger-side front and did it again. She was still anxious to get back to her picture, but she found she was glad she had come, just the same. This was sort of exciting.
The thought of Henry’s face when he saw what had happened to his precious Thunderbird was actually making her horny. God knew why, but she thought that when she finally got back on board the Lisa Marie, she might have a new trick or two to show The King.
She moved on to the rear tires. The bayonet did not cut quite so easily now, but she made up for it with her own enthusiasm, sawing energetically through the sidewalls of the tires.
When the job was done, when all four tires were not just punctured but gutted, Myra stepped back to survey her work. She was breathing rapidly, and she armed sweat off her forehead in a quick, mannish gesture. Henry Beaufort’s Thunderbird now sat a good six inches lower on the driveway than it had when she arrived. It rested on its wheeirims with the expensive radials spread out around them in wrinkled rubber puddles. And then, although she had not been asked to do so, Myra decided to add the extra touch that means so much. She raked the tip of the bayonet down the side of the car, splitting the deeply polished surface with a long, jagged scratch.
The bayonet made a small, wailing screech against the metal and Myra looked at the house, suddenly sure that Henry Beaufort must have heard, that the shade in the bedroom window was suddenly going to flap up and he would be looking out at her.
It didn’t happen, but she knew it was time to leave. She had overstayed her welcome here, and besides-back in her own bedroom, The King awaited. Myra hurried down the driveway, reseating the bayonet in its scabbard and then dropping the tail of Chuck’s shirt over it again.
One car passed her before she got back to The Mellow Tiger, but it was going the other way-assuming the driver wasn’t ogling her in his rearview mirror, he would have seen only her back.
She slid into her own car, yanked the rubber band out of her hair, allowing her locks to fall around her face in their usual limp fashion, and drove back to town. She did this one-handed. Her other hand had business to take care of below her waist. She let herself into her house and bounded up the stairs by twos. The picture was on the bed, where she had left it. Myra kicked off her shoes, pushed her jeans down, grabbed the picture, and jumped into bed with it. The cracks in the glass were gone; The King had been restored to youth and beauty.
The same could be said for Myra Evans… at least temporarily.
7
Over the door, the silver bell sang its ’ingly little tune.
“Hello, Mrs. Potter!” Leland Gaunt said cheerily. He made a tick-mark on the sheet by the cash register. “I’d about decided you weren’t going to come by.”
“I almost didn’t,” Lenore Potter said. She looked upset, distracted. Her silver hair, usually coiffed to perfection, had been tacked up in an indifferent bun. An inch of her slip was showing beneath the hem of her expensive gray twill skirt, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. The eyes themselves were restless, shooting from place to place with baleful, angry suspicion.
“It was the Howdy Doody puppet you wanted to look at, wasn’t it?
I believe you told me you have quite a collection of children’s memorab-”
“I really don’t believe I can look at such gentle things today, you know,” Lenore said. She was the wife of the richest lawyer in Castle Rock, and she spoke in clipped, lawyerly tones. “I’m in an extremely poor frame of mind. I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”
Mr. Gaunt stepped around the main display case and came toward her, his face instantly filled with concern and sympathy. “My dear lady, what’s happened?
