Needful Things - Stephen King [223]
"You you're not going to hurt him, are you?"
"Me? You do me a very great wrong, Patricia Chalmers. I am a pacifist-one of the world's great pacifists. I wouldn't raise a hand against our Sheriff. I just meant that he's got business on the other side of the bridge this afternoon. He doesn't know it yet, but he does. " "Oh."
"Now, Polly?"
"Yes?"
"Your check does not constitute complete payment for the azka. "
"It doesn't?"
"No." He was holding a plain white envelope in his hands. Polly didn't have the slightest idea where it had come from, but that seemed perfectly all right. "In order to finish paying for your amulet, Polly, you have to help me play a little trick on someone."
"Alan?" Suddenly she was as alarmed as a woods-rabbit which gets a dry whiff of fire on a hot summer afternoon. "Do you mean Alan?"
"I most certainly do not," he said. "Asking you to play a trick on someone you know, let alone someone you think you love, would be unethical, my dear."
"It would?"
"Yes although I believe you really ought to think carefully about your relationship with the Sheriff, Polly. You may find that it all comes down to a fairly simple choice: a little pain now to save a great deal of pain later. Put another way, those who marry in haste often live to repent in leisure."
"I don't understand you."
"I know you don't. You'll understand me better, Polly, after you check your mail. You see, I'm not the only one who has attracted his snooping, sniffy nose. For now, let us discuss the small prank I want you to play. The butt of this joke is a fellow whom I have just recently employed. His name is Merrill."
"Ace Merrill?"
His smile faded. "Don't interrupt me, Polly. Don't ever interrupt me when I am speaking. Not unless you want your hands to swell up like innertubes filled with poison gas."
She shrank away from him, her dreamy, dreaming eyes wide.
"I.. I'm sorry." '. 'All right. Your apology is accepted this time. Now listen to me. Listen very carefully."
9
Frank Jewett and Brion McGinley, the Middle School's geography teacher and basketball coach, walked from Room 6 into the outer office )just behind Alice Tanner. Frank was grinning and telling Brion a joke he'd heard earlier that day from a textbook salesman. It had to do with a doctor who was finding it difficult to diagnose a woman's illness. He had narrowed it down to two possibles-AIDS or Alzheimer's-but that was as far as he could go.
"So the gal's husband takes the doctor aside," Frank went on as they walked into the outer office. Alice was bending over her desk, thumbing through a little pile of messages there, and Frank lowered his voice. Alice could be quite the stick when it came to jokes which were even slightly off-color.
"Yeah?" Now Brion was also beginning to grin.
"Yeah. He's real upset. He says, 'Jeer, Doc-is that the best you can do? Isn't there some way we can figure out which one she has?' "
Alice selected two of the pink message forms and started into the inner office with them. She got as far as the doorway and then stopped short, as if she'd walked into an invisible stone wall. Neither of the grinning middle-aged small-town white guys noticed.
"'sure, it's easy,' the doc says. 'Take her about twenty-five miles into the woods and leave her there. If she finds her way back, don't fuck her.' " Brion McGinley gaped foolishly at his boss for a moment, then exploded into hearty guffaws of laughter. Principal jewett joined him. They were laughing so hard that neither of them heard Alice the first time she called Frank's name. There was no problem the second time. The second time she nearly shrieked it.
Frank hurried over to her. "Alice? What-" Then he saw what, and a terrible, glassy fright filled him. His words dried up. He felt the flesh of his testicles crawling madly; his balls seemed to be trying to pull themselves back to where they had come from.
It was the magazines.
The secret magazines from the bottom drawer.