Needful Things - Stephen King [279]
She had turned her head and stared at Cora when the doors opened.
The King only kept looking up at Myra, blinking those sleepy, beautiful blue eyes of his.
"Myra!" Cora had exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"Well," Myra said smugly, "I'm sure not vacuuming the floor."
Cora gasped for breath, utterly stunned. "Well well well I'll be butched! she cried, her voice rising as her wind returned.
"Then go be butched," Myra said, pumping her hips faster, "and take those silly sunglasses off while you're at it. They look stupid.
Get out of here. Go back to Castle Rock. We're busy aren't we, E?"
"That's raht, sweet thang," The long said. "Just as busy as two twiddlybugs in a carpet."
Horror turned to fury, and Cora's paralysis broke with a snap.
She rushed at her so-called friend, meaning to rip her deceitful eyes from their sockets. But when she raised one clawed hand to do so, Myra reached out-never missing a stroke with her pumping hips as she did-and tore the sunglasses from Cora's face with her own hand.
Cora had squeezed her eyes shut in surprise and when she opened them, she had been lying in her own bed again. The sunglasses were on the floor, both lenses shattered.
"No," Cora moaned, lurching out of bed. She wanted to shriek, but some inner voice-not her own-warned her that the police in the garage would hear if she did, and come running. "No, please no, please, pleeeease-" She tried to fit chunks of the broken lenses back into the streamlined gold frames, but it had been impossible. They were broken.
Broken by that evil whoring slut. Broken by herfriend, Myra Evans.
Her friend who had somehow found her own way to Graceland, her friend who was even now, as Cora tried to put together a priceless artifact that was irretrievably broken, making love to The King.
Cora looked up. Her eyes had become glittering black slits.
"I'll butch her," she had whispered hoarsely. "See if I don't."
6
She read the sign in the window of Needful Things, paused for a moment, thinking, and then walked around to the service alley. She brushed by Francine Pelletier, who was on her way out of the alley, putting something into her purse. Cora hardly even looked at her.
Halfway down the alley she saw Mr. Gaunt standing behind a wooden table which lay across the open back door of his shop like a barricade.
"Ah, Cora!" he exclaimed. "I was wondering when you'd drop by."
"That bitch!" Cora spat. "That double-crossing little slut-bitch!"
"Pardon me, Cora," Mr. Gaunt said with urbane politeness, "but you seem to have missed a button or two." He pointed one of his odd, long fingers at the front of her dress.
Cora had slipped the first thing she'd found in the closet on over her nakedness, and had managed to do only the top button.
Below that one, the dress gaped open to the curls of her pubic hair. Her belly, swelled by a great many Ring-Dings, Yodels, and chocolate-covered cherries during Santa Barbara (and all her other shows), curved smoothly out.
"Who gives a shit?" Cora snapped.
"Not I," Mr. Gaunt agreed serenely. "How may I help you?"
"That bitch is fucking The King. She broke my sunglasses. I want to kill her."
"Do you," Mr. Gaunt said, raising his eyebrows. "Well, I can't say that I don't sympathize, Cora, because I do. It may be that a woman who would steal another woman's man deserves to live. I wouldn't care to say on that subject one way or the other-I've been a businessman all my life, and know very little about matters of the heart. But a woman who deliberately breaks another woman's most treasured possession well, that is a much more serious thing. Do you agree?"
She began to smile. It was a hard smile. It was a merciless smile.
It was a smile utterly devoid of sanity. "Too fucking right," said Cora Rusk.
Mr. Gaunt turned around for a moment. When he faced Cora again, he was holding an automatic pistol in one hand.
"Might you be looking for something like this?" he asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After Buster finished with Myrtle, he fell into a deep fugue state.
All