Needful Things - Stephen King [121]
In his dream, Brian finally began to cry. He saw, all right. He saw)just fine, now that it was too late to make any difference.
Gaunt squeezed the baseball. More blood poured out, and his fingertips sank deep into its white, fleshy surface. "If you don't want everybody In Castle Rock to know you were the one who started the avalanche, Brian, you had better do what I tell you."
Brian wept harder.
"When you deal with me," Gaunt said, winding up to throw, you want to remember two things: Mr. Gaunt knows best and the dealing isn't done until Mr. Gaunt sys the dealing's done."
He threw with that sinuous all-of-a-sudden delivery which had made Sandy Koufax so hard to hit (that was, at least, the humble opinion of Brian's father), and when the ball hit Hugh Priest's glove this time, it exploded. Blood and hair and stringy gobbets of flesh flew up in the bright autumn sun. And Brian had awakened, weeping into his pillow.
8
Now he was off to do what Mr. Gaunt had told him he must do. it had been simple enough to get away; he simply told his mother and father he didn't want to go to church that morning because he felt sick to his stomach (nor was this a lie. Once they were gone, he made his preparations.
It was hard to pedal his bike and even harder to keep it balanced, because of the Playmate picnic cooler in the bike basket. It was very heavy, and he was sweating and out of breath by the time he reached the jerzyck house. There was no hesitation this time, no ringing the doorbell, no preplanned story. No one was here. Sandy Koufax/Leland Gaunt had told him in the dream that the jerzycks would be staying late after the eleven o'clock Mass to discuss the upcoming Casino Nite festivities and would then be going to visit friends. Brian believed him. All he wanted now was to finish with this awful business just as fast as he could. And when it was done, he would go home, park his bike, and spend the rest of the day in bed.
He lifted the picnic cooler out of the bike basket, using both hands, and set it down on the grass. He was behind the hedge, where no one could see him. What he was about to do would be noisy, but Koufax/Gaunt had told him not to worry about that. He said most of the people on Willow Street were Catholics, and almost all of those not attending eleven o'clock Mass would have gone at eight and then left on their various Sunday day-trips. Brian didn't know if that was true or not. He only knew two things for sure: Mr. Gaunt knew best, and the deal wasn't done until Mr. Gaunt said the deal was done.
And this was the deal.
Brian opened the Playmate cooler. There were about a dozen good-sized rocks inside. Wrapped around each and held with a rubber band or two was a sheet of paper from Brian's school notebook. Printed on each sheet in large letters was this simple message:
I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE.
THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING
Brian took one of these and walked up the lawn until he was less than ten feet from the jerzycks' big living-room window-what had been called a "picture window" back in the early sixties, when this house had been built. He wound up, hesitated for only a moment, and then let fly like Sandy Koufax facing the lead-off batter in the seventh game of the World Series. There was a huge and unmusical crash, followed by a thud as the rock hit the living-room carpet and rolled across the floor.
The sound had an odd effect on Brian. His fear left him, and his distaste for this further task-which could by no stretch of the imagination be dismissed as something so inconsequential as a Prank-also evaporated. The sound of breaking glass excited him made him feel, in fact, the way he felt when he had his daydreams about Miss Ratcliffe. Those had been foolish, and he knew that now, but there was nothing foolish about this. This was fear Besides, he found that he now wanted the Sandy Koufax card more than ever. He had discovered another large fact about possessions and the Peculiar Psychological state they induce: the more one has to go through