Needful Things - Stephen King [316]
Now that he had drawn back a little from the dangerous lure of sentiment, he remembered his opposition to the purchase of this thing with something like amazement. All his life he had been fascinated with magic, and of course he would have been entranced by the old snake-in-a-can-of-nuts trick as a kid. So why had he spoken to Todd in such an unfriendly way when the boy had wanted to buy it, and then pretended not to see the boy's hurt? Had it been jealousy of Todd's youth and enthusiasm? An inability to remember the wonder of simple things? What?
He didn't know. He only knew it was exactly the sort of trick a Mr. Gaunt would understand, and he wanted it with him now.
Alan bent back into the car, grabbed a flashlight from the small box of jumbled tools sitting on the rear seat, then walked past the nose of Mr. Gaunt's Tucker Talisman (still without noticing it), and passed under the deep-green awning of Needful Things.
8
Well, here I am. Here I am at last.
Alan's heart was pounding hard but steadily in his chest. In his mind, the faces of his son and his wife and Sean Rusk seemed to have combined. He glanced at the sign in the window again and then tried the door. It was locked. Overhead, the canvas awning rippled and snapped in the howling wind.
He had tucked the Tastee-Munch can into his shirt. Now he touched it with his right hand and seemed to draw some indescribable but perfectly real comfort from it.
"Okay," he muttered. "Here I come, ready or not." He reversed the flashlight and used the handle to smash a hole in the glass. He steeled himself for the wail of the burglar alarm, but it didn't come.
Either Gaunt hadn't turned it on or there was no alarm. He reached through the jagged hole and tried the inside knob. It turned, and for the first time, Alan Pangborn stepped into Needful Things.
The smell hit him first; it was deep and still and dusty. it wasn't the smell of a new shop but of a place which had been untenanted for months or even years. Holding his gun in his right hand, he shone the flashlight around with his left. it illuminated a bare floor, bare walls, and a number of glass cases. The cases were empty, the stock was gone. Everything was blanketed by a thick fall of dust, and the dust was undisturbed by any mark.
No one's been here for a long, long time.
But how could that possibly be, when he had seen people going in and out all week long?
Because he's not a man at all. Because the devil's voice is sweet to hear.
He took two more steps, using the flashlight to cover the empty room in zones, breathing the dry museum dust which hung in the air. He looked behind him and saw, in a flash of lightning, the tracks of his own feet in the dust. He shone the light back into the store, ran it from right to left along the case which had also served Mr.
Gaunt as a counter and stopped.
A video-cassette recorder/player sat there, next to a Sony portable TV-one of the sporty models, round instead of square, with a case as red as a fire-engine. A cord was looped around the television.
And there was something on top of the VCR. In this light it looked like a book, but Alan didn't think that was what it was.
He walked over and trained his light first on the TV. It was as thickly coated with dust as the floor and the glass cases. The cord looped around it was a short length of coaxial cable with a connector at either end. Alan moved his light to the thing on top of the VCR, the thing which wasn't a book but a video cassette in an unmarked black plastic case.
A dusty white business envelope lay beside it. Written on the front of the envelope was the message
ATTENTION SHERIFF ALAN PANGBORN.
He set his gun and his flashlight down on the glass counter, took the envelope, opened it, and pulled out the single sheet of paper inside. Then he picked up the flashlight again and trained its powerful circle of light on the short typed message.
Dear Sheriff Pangborn, By now you will have discovered that I am a rather special sort of businessman-the rare sort who actually