Needful Things - Stephen King [178]
Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. His mother didn't pick it up, even though there was an extension in the bedroom. She)just went on singing along with the music. At last he heard Sean answer.
"Who is it please?"
Brian thought calmly: He'll get it out of me. I can't lie, not to a policeman. I couldn't even lie to Mrs. Leroux about who broke the vase on her desk when she had to go down to the office that time.
He'll get it out of me and I'll go to jailfor murder.
That was when Brian Rusk first began to think of suicide. These thoughts were not lurid, not romantic; they were very calm, very rational. His father kept a shotgun in the garage, and at that moment the shotgun seemed to make perfect sense. The shotgun seemed to be the answer to everything.
"Bri-unnn! Telephone!"
"I don't want to talk to Stan!" he yelled. "Tell him to call back tomorrow!"
"It's not Stan," Sean called back. "It's a guy. A grown-up."
Large icy hands seized Brian's heart and squeezed it. This was it-Sheriff Pangborn was on the phone.
Brian? I have some questions to ask you. They're very serious questions. I'm afraid if you don't come right down to answer them, I'll have to come and get you. I'll have to come in my police car.
Pretty soon your name is going to be in the paper, Brian, and your picture is going to be on TV, and all your friends will see it. Your mother and father will see it, too, and your little brother. And when they show the picture, the man on the news will say, "This is Brian Rusk, the boy who helped murder Wilma jerzyck and Nettle Cobb."
"Huh-huh-who is it?" he called downstairs in a shrieky little voice.
"I dunno!" Sean had been torn away from The Transformers and sounded irritated. "I think he said his name was Crowfix. Something like that."
Crowfix?
Brian stood in the doorway, his heart thumping in his chest.
Two big clown-spots of color now burned in his pallid face.
Not Crowfix.
Koufax.
Sandy Koufax had called him on the phone. Except Brian had a pretty good idea of who it really was.
He went down the stairs on leaden feet. The telephone handset seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds.
"Hello, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said softly.
"Huh-Huh-Hello," Brian replied in the same shrieky little voice.
"You don't have a thing to worry about," Mr. Gaunt said. "If Mrs. Mislaburski had seen you throw those rocks, she wouldn't have asked you what was going on over there, now would she?"
"How do you know about that?" Brian again felt like throwing up.
"That doesn't matter. What matters is that you did the right thing, Brian. Exactly the right thing. You said you thought Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having an argument. If the police do find you, they'll just think you heard the person who was throwing the rocks.
They'll think you didn't see him because he was behind the house."
Brian looked through the archway into the TV room to make sure Sean wasn't snooping. He wasn't; he was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in his lap.
"I can't lie!" he whispered into the telephone. "I always get caught out when I lie!"
"Not this time, Brian," Mr. Gaunt said. "This time you're going to do it like a champ."
And the most horrible thing of all was that Brian thought Mr.
Gaunt knew best about this, too.
2
While her older son was thinking of suicide and then dickering in a desperate, quiet whisper with Mr. Gaunt, Cora Rusk was dancing quietly around her bedroom in her housecoat.
Except it wasn't her bedroom.
When she put on the sunglasses Mr. Gaunt had sold her, she was in Graceland.
She danced through fabulous rooms which smelled of Pine-Sol and fried food, rooms where the only sounds were the quiet