Needful Things - Stephen King [124]
"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
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.
It is still there to this day, on Route 117 by the railroad tracks and just across the road from McDonald's. And it was to Maurice that Danforth "Buster" Keeton took his wife for lunch on Sunday, October 13th.
Myrtle spent a good deal of that Sunday in an ecstatic daze, and the fine food at Maurice was not the reason. For the last few months-almost a year, really-life with Danforth had been extremely unpleasant. He ignored her almost completely except when he yelled at her. Her self-esteem, which had never been very high, plummeted to new depths. She knew as well as any woman ever has that abuse does not have to be administered with the fists to be effective. Men as well as women can wound with their tongues, and Danforth Keeton knew how to use his very well; he had inflicted a thousand invisible cuts on her with its sharp sides over the last year.
She did not know about the gambling-she really believed he went to the track mostly to watch. She didn't know about the embezzlement, either. She did know that several members of Danforth's family had been unstable, but she did not connect this behavior with Danforth himself. He didn't drink to excess, didn't forget to put on his clothes before going out in the morning, didn't talk to people who weren't there, and so she assumed he was all right. She assumed, in other words, that something was wrong with her. That at some point this something had simply caused Danforth to stop loving her.
She had spent the last six months or so trying to face the bleak prospect of the thirty or even forty loveless years which lay ahead of her as this man's mate, this man who had become by turns angry,