Needful Things - Stephen King [269]
"Why, thank you, Mr. Warburton!" Mr. Gaunt said, taking a five-dollar bill from the black janitor. He handed him back a single and one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought from Boston.
"Thank you, Miss Milliken!" He took ten and gave back eight.
He charged them what they could afford-not a penny more or a penny less. Each according to his means was Mr. Gaunt's motto, and never mind each according to his needs, because they were all needful things, and he had come here to fill their emptiness and end their aches.
"Good to see you, Mr. Emerson!"
Oh, it was always good, so very good, to be doing business in the old way again. And business had never been better.
2
Alan Pangborn wasn't in Castle Rock. While the reporters and the State Police gathered at one end of Main Street and Leland Gaunt conducted his going-out-of-business sale halfway up the hill, Alan was sitting at the nurses' station of the Blumer Wing in Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.
The Blumer Wing was small-only fourteen patient rooms but what it lacked in size it made up for in color. The walls of the inpatient rooms were painted in bright primary shades. A mobile hung from the ceiling in the nurses' station, the birds depending from it swinging and dipping gracefully around a central spindle.
Alan was sitting in front of a huge mural which depicted a medley of Mother Goose rhymes. One section of the mural showed a man leaning across a table, holding something out to a small boy, obviously a hick, who looked both frightened and fascinated. Something about this particular image had struck Alan, and a snatch of childhood rhyme rose like a whisper in his mind: Simple Simon met a pie-man going to the fair.
"Simple Simon," said the pie-man, "come and taste my wares!"
A ripple of gooseflesh had broken out on Alan's arms-tiny bumps like beads of cold sweat. He couldn't say why, and that seemed perfectly normal. Never in his entire life had he felt as shaken, as scared, as deeply confused as he did right now. Something totally beyond his ability to understand was happening in Castle Rock. it had become clearly apparent only late this afternoon, when everything had seemed to blow sky-high at once, but it had begun days, maybe even a week, ago. He didn't know what it was, but he knew that Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck had been only the first outward signs.
And he was terribly afraid that things were still progressing while he sat here with Simple Simon and the pie-man.
A nurse, Miss Hendrie according to the small name-plate on her breast, walked up the corridor on faintly squeaking crepe soles, weaving her way gracefully among the toys which littered the hall.
When Alan came in, half a dozen kids, some with limbs in casts or slings, some with the partial baldness he associated with chemotherapy treatments, had been playing in the hall, trading blocks and trucks, shouting amiably to each other. Now it was the supper hour, and they had gone either down to the cafeteria or back to their rooms.
"How is he?" Alan asked Miss Hendrie.
"No change." She looked at Alan with a calm expression which contained an element of hostility. "Sleeping. He should be sleeping.
He has had a great shock."
"What do you hear from his parents?"
"We called the father's place of employment in South Paris. He had an installation job over in New Hampshire this afternoon. He's left for home, I understand, and will be informed when he arrives.
He should get here around nine, I would think, but of course it's impossible to tell."
"What about the mother?"
"I don't know," Miss Hendrie said. The hostility was more apparent now, but it was no longer aimed at Alan. "I didn't make that call. All I know is what I see-she's not here. This little boy saw his brother commit suicide with a rifle, and although it happened at home, the mother is not here yet. You'll have to excuse me now-I have to fill the med-cart."
"Of course," Alan muttered. He watched her as she started away, then rose from his chair. "Miss