Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [380]
Please get out of here, Molly prayed. Please, just take your film and go. And whatever else you do, don't touch me. Please.
If he touched her while he was looking like that, Molly thought she would scream. Why did the place have to be empty? Why couldn't at least one other customer be in here, preferably Sheriff Pangborn, but since he seemed to be otherwise engaged, anyone at all? She supposed Mr Constantine, the pharmacist, was in the store someplace, but the drug counter looked easily a quarter of a mile away, and while she knew it couldn't be that far, not really, it was still too far for him to reach her in a hurry if old man Merrill decided to touch her. And suppose Mr Constantine had gone out to Nan's for coffee with Mr Keeton from the selectmen's office? The more she thought about that possibility, the more likely it seemed. When something genuinely weird like this happened, wasn't it an almost foregone conclusion that it should happen while one was alone?
He's having a mental breakdown of some kind.
She heard herself saying with glassy cheerfulness: 'Here you are, Mr Merrill.' She put the film on the counter and scooted to her left and behind the register at once, wanting it between her and him.
The ancient leather purse came out of Pop Merrill's pants, and her stuttering fingers miskeyed the purchase so she had to clear the register and start again.
He was holding two ten-dollar bills out to her.
She told herself they were only rumpled from being squashed up with the other bills in that little pocketbook, probably not even old, although they looked old. That didn't stop her galloping mind, however. Her mind insisted that they weren't just rumpled, they were rumpled and slimy. It further insisted that old wasn't the right word, that old wasn't even in the ballpark. For those particular items of currency, not even the word ancient would do. Those were prehistoric tens, somehow printed before Christ was born and Stonehenge was built, before the first low-browed, no-neck Neanderthal had crawled out of his cave. They belonged to a time when even God had been a baby.
She didn't want to touch them.
She had to touch them.
The man would want his change.
Steeling herself, she took the bills and shoved them into the cash register as fast as she could, banging a finger so hard she ripped most of the nail clear off, an ordinarily exquisite pain she would not notice, in her extreme state of distress, until sometime later ... when, that was, she had chivvied her willing mind around enough to scold herself for acting like a whoopsy little girl on the edge of her first menstrual period.
At the moment, however, she only concentrated on getting the bills into the register as fast as she could and getting her hand off them, but even later she would remember what the surfaces of those tens had felt like. It felt as if they were actually crawling and moving under the pads of her fingers; as if billions of germs, huge germs almost big enough to be seen with the naked eye, were sliding along them toward her, eager to infect her with whatever he had.
But the man would want his change.
She concentrated on that, lips pressed together so tightly they were dead white; four singles that did not, absolutely did not want to come out from beneath the roller that held them down in the cash drawer. Then a dime, but oh jesus-please-us, there were no dimes, and what the hell was wrong with her, what had she done to be saddled for so