Needful Things - Stephen King [76]
There was a pair of dancing jester-puppets. There was a music box, old and ornately carved-Mr. Gaunt said he was sure it played something unusual when it was opened, but he couldn't remember just what, and it was locked shut. He reckoned a buyer would have to find someone to make a key for it; there were still a few oldtimers around, he said, who had such skill-a. He was asked a few times if the music box could be returned if the buyer did get the lid to open and discovered that the tune was not to his or her taste.
Mr. Gaunt smiled and pointed to a new sign on the wall. It read:
I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES CAVEAT EMPTOR!
"What does that mean?" Lucille Dunham asked. Lucille was a waitress at Nan's who had stopped in with her friend Rose Ellen Myers on her coffee break.
"It means that if you buy a pig in a poke, you keep the pig and he keeps your poke," Rose Ellen said. She saw that Mr. Gaunt had overheard her (and she could have sworn she'd seen him on the other side of the shop only a moment before), and she blushed bright red.
Mr. Gaunt, however, only laughed. "That's right," he told her.
"That's exactly what it means!"
An old long-barreled revolver in one case with a card in front of it which read NED BUNTLINE SPECIAL; a boy puppet with wooden red hair, freckles, and a fixed friendly grin (HOWDY DOODY PROTOTYPE, read the card); boxes of stationery, very nice but not remarkable; a selection of antique post-cards; pen-andpencil sets; linen handkerchiefs; stuffed animals. There was, it seemed, an item for every taste and-even though there was not a single price-tag in the entire store for every budget.
Mr. Gaunt did a fine business that day. Most of the items he sold were nice but in no way unique. He did, however, make a number of "special" deals, and all of these sales took place during those lulls when there was only a single customer in the store.
"When things get slow, I get restless," he told Sally Ratcliffe, Brian Rusk's speech teacher, with his friendly grin, "and when I get restless, I sometimes get reckless. Bad for the seller but awfully good for the buyer."
Miss Ratcliffe was a devout member of Rev. Rose's Baptist flock, had met her fiance Lester Pratt there, and in addition to her No Casino Nite button, she wore one which said I'M ONE OF THE SAVED! HOW 'BOUT You? The splinter labelled PETRIFIED WOOD FROM THE HOLY LAND caught her attention at once, and she did not object when Mr. Gaunt took it from its case and dropped it into her hand. She bought it for seventeen dollars and a promise to play a harmless little prank on Frank jewett, the principal at Castle Rock Middle School. She left the shop five minutes after she had entered, looking dreamy and abstracted.
Mr. Gaunt had offered to wrap her purchase for her, but Miss Ratcliffe refused, saying she wanted to hold it. Looking at her as she went out the door, you would have been hard-put to tell if her feet were on the floor or drifting just above it.
2
The silver bell jingled.
Cora Rusk came in, determined to buy the picture of The King, and was extremely upset when Mr. Gaunt told her it had been sold.
Cora wanted to know who had bought it. "I'm sorry," Mr. Gaunt said, "but the lady was from out of state. There was an Oklahoma plate on the car she was driving."
"Well, I'll be butched!" Cora cried in tones of anger and real distress. She hadn't realized just how badly she wanted that picture until Mr. Gaunt informed her that it was gone.
Henry Gendron and his wife, Yvette, were in the shop at that time,