Needful Things - Stephen King [226]
"Yes, I I understand. I do." But her dreaming face was troubled.
"You don't look happy."
"Well I "
"Things like the azka don't always work very well for people who aren't happy," Mr. Gaunt said. He pointed at the tiny bulge where the silver ball lay against her skin, and again she seemed to feel something shift strangely inside. At the same moment, horrible cramps of pain invaded her hands, spreading like a network of cruel steel hooks. Polly moaned loudly.
Mr. Gaunt crooked the finger he had pointed in a come-along gesture. She felt that shift in the silver ball again, more clearly this time, and the pain was gone.
"You don't want to go back to the way things were, do you, Polly?"
Mr. Gaunt asked in a silky voice.
"No!" she cried. Her breast was moving rapidly up and down.
Her hands began to make frantic washing gestures, one against the other, and her wide eyes never left his. "Please, no!"
"Because things could go from bad to worse, couldn't they?"
"Yes! Yes, they could!"
"And nobody understands, do they? Not even the Sheriff. He doesn't know what it's like to wake up at two in the morning with hell in his hands, does he?"
She shook her head and began to weep.
"Do as I say and you'll never have to wake up that way again, Polly. And here is something elseeo as I say and if anyone in Castle Rock finds out that your child burned to death in a San Francisco tenement, they won't find it out from me."
Polly uttered a hoarse, lost cry-the cry of a woman hopelessly ensnarled in a grinding nightmare.
Mr. Gaunt smiled.
"There are more kinds of hell than one, aren't there, Polly?"
"How do you know about him?" she whispered. "No one knows.
Not even Alan. I told Alan-" "I know because knowing.is my business. And suspicion is his, Polly-Alan never believed what you told him."
"He said-" "I'm sure he said all kinds of things, but he never believed you.
The woman you hired to baby-sit was a drug addict, wasn't she?
That wasn't your fault, but of course the things which led to that situation were all a matter of personal choice, Polly, weren't they?
Your choice. The young woman you hired to watch Kelton passed out and dropped a cigarette-or maybe it was a joint-into a wastebasket.
Hers was the finger that pulled the trigger, you might say, but the gun was loaded because of your pride, your inability to bend your neck before your parents and the other good people of Castle Rock."
Polly was sobbing harder now.
"Yet is a young woman not entitled to her pride?" Mr. Gaunt asked gently. "When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?"
Polly raised her streaming, defiant face. "I thought it was my business," she said. "I still do. If that's pride, so what?"
"Yes," he said soothingly. "Spoken like a champion butthey would have taken you back, wouldn't they? Your mother and father?
It might not have been pleasant-not with the child always there to remind them, not with the way tongues wag in pleasant little backwaters like this one-but it would have been possible."
"Yes, and I would have spent every day trying to stay out from under my mother's thumb!" she burst out in a furious, ugly voice which bore almost no resemblance to her normal tone.
"Yes," Mr. Gaunt said in that same soothing voice. "So you stayed where you were. You had Kelton, and you had your pride. And when Kelton was dead, you still had your pride didn't you?"
Polly screamed in grief and agony and buried her wet face in her hands.
"It hurts worse than your hands, doesn't it?" Mr. Gaunt asked.
Polly nodded her head without taking her face out of her hands.
Mr. Gaunt put his own ugly, long-fingered hands behind his head and spoke in the tone of one who gives a eulogy: "Humanity! So noble!
So willing to sacrifice the other fellow!"
"Stop!" she moaned. "Can't you stop?"
"It's a secret thing, isn't it, Patricia?"
"Yes."
He touched her forehead. Polly uttered a gagging moan but did not draw away.
"That's one door into hell you'd like to keep locked, isn't it?"