Needful Things - Stephen King [209]
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? You look dreadful!"
"Of course I look dreadful!" she snapped. "The normal flow of my psychic aura has been disrupted-badly disrupted! Instead of blue, the color of calm and serenity, my entire calava has gone bright magenta!
And it's all the fault of that bitch across the street!
That high-box bitch!"
Mr. Gaunt made peculiar soothing gestures which never quite touched any part of Lenore Potter's body. "What bitch is that, Mrs.
Potter?" he asked, knowing perfectly well.
"Bonsaint, of course! Bonsaint! That nasty lying Stephanie Bonsaint! My aura has never been magenta before, Mr. Gaunt! Deep pink a few times, yes, and once, after I was almost run down in the street by a drunk in Oxford, I think it might have turned red for a few minutes, but it has never been magenta! I simply cannot live like this!"
"Of course not," Mr. Gaunt soothed. "No one could expect you to, my dear."
His eyes finally captured hers. This was not easy with Mrs.
Potter's gaze darting around in such a distracted manner, but he did finally manage. And when he did, Lenore calmed almost at once.
Looking into Mr. Gaunt's eyes, she discovered, was almost like looking into her own aura when she had been doing all her exercises, eating the right foods (bean-sprouts and tofu, mostly), and maintaining the surfaces of her calava with at least an hour of meditation when she arose in the morning and again before she went to bed at night. His eyes were the faded, serene blue of desert skies.
"Come," he said. "Over here." He led her to the short row of three high-backed plush velvet chairs where so many citizens of Castle Rock had sat over the last week. And when she was seated, Mr. Gaunt invited: "Tell me all about it."
"She's always hated me," Lenore said. "She's always thought that her husband hasn't risen in the Firm as fast as she wanted because my husband kept him back. And that I put him up to it. She is a woman with a small mind and a big bosom and a dirty-gray aura.
You know the type."
"Indeed," Mr. Gaunt said.
"But I never knew how much she hated me until this morning!"
Lenore Potter was growing agitated again in spite of Mr. Gaunt's settling influence. "I got up and my flowerbeds were absolutely ruined! Ruined! Everything that was lovely yesterday is dying today!
Everything which was soothing to the aura and nourishing to the calava has