Needful Things - Stephen King [256]
His toe relaxed a bit. "Promise me."
"Yes! Anything you want! Only don't do that! Don't don't tease me any more, Bri! Let's go in and watch The Transformers!
No you pick! Anything you want! Even Wapner! We can watch Wapner if you want to! All week! All month! I'll watch with you!
Only stop scaring me, Brian, please stop scaring me!"
Brian Rusk might not have heard. His eyes seemed to float in his distant, serene face.
"Never go there," he said. "Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he's really not a man, Sean.
He's not a man at all. Swear to me you'll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells."
"I swear! I swear!" Sean babbled. "I swear on Mommy's name!"
"No," Brian said, "you can't do that, because he got her, too.
Swear on your own name, Sean. Swear it on your very own name."
"I do!" Sean cried out in the hot, dim garage. He held his hands out imploringly to his brother. "I really do, I swear on my very own name! Now please put the gun down, Brl-" "I love you, baby brother."
He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. "Sandy Koufax sucks," Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe.
Sean's drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.
33
Leland Gaunt stood at his shop window, looking out on Main Street and smiling gently. The sound of the shot from up on Ford Street was faint, but his ears were sharp and he heard it.
His smile broadened a little.
He took down the sign in the window, the one which said he was open by appointment only, and put up a new one. This one read
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
"We're having fun now," Leland Gaunt said to no one at all.
"Yessirree."
Polly Chalmers knew nothing of these things.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
While Castle Rock was bearing the first real fruits of Mr.
Gaunt's labors, she was out at the end of Town Road #3, at the old Camber place. She had gone there as soon as she had finished her conversation with Alan.
Finished it? she thought. Oh my dear, that's much too civilized.
After you hung up on him-isn't that what you mean?
All right, she agreed. After I hung up on him. But he went behind my back. And when I called him on it, he got all flustered and then lied about it. He lied about it. I happen to think that behavior like that deserves an uncivilized response.
Something stirred uneasily in her at this, something which might have spoken if she had given it time and room, but she gave it neither.
She wanted no dissenting voices; did not, in fact, want to think about her last conversation with Alan Pangborn at all. She just wanted to take care of her business out here at the end of Town Road #3 and then go back home. Once she was there, she intended to take a cool bath and then go to bed for twelve or sixteen hours.
That deep voice managed just five words: But, Polly have you thought. No. She hadn't. She supposed she would have to think in time, but now was too soon. When the thinking began, the hurting would begin, too. For now she only wanted to take care of business and not think at all.
The Camber place was spooky reputed by some to be haunted.
Not so many years ago, two people-a small boy and Sheriff George Bannerman-had died in the dooryard of this house.
Two others, Gary Pervier and Joe Camber himself, had died just down the hill. Polly parked her car over the place where a woman named Donna Trenton had once made the fatal mistake of parking her Ford Pinto, and got out. The azka swung back and fotth between her breasts as she did.
She looked around uneasily for a moment at the sagging porch, the paintless walls overrun by climbing ivy, the windows which were mostly broken and stared blindly back at her. Crickets sang their stupid songs in the grass, and the hot sun beat down as it had on those terrible days when Donna Trenton had fought for her life here, and for the life of her son.
What am I doing here? Polly thought. What in God's name am I doing here?
But she knew, and it had nothing to do with Alan Pangborn or Kelton