Needful Things

by Stephen King

  Mr. Gaunt found himself disliking Pangborn's face on sight. Nor did this much surprise him. He was even better at reading faces than he was at remembering them, and the words on this one were large and somehow dangerous.

  Pangborn's face changed suddenly; the eyes widened a little, the good-humored mouth narrowed down to a tight slit. Gaunt felt a brief and totally uncharacteristic burst of fear. He sees me! he thought, although that, of course, was impossible. The Sheriff took half a step backward ... and then laughed. Gaunt understood at once what had happened, but this did not moderate his instant deep dislike of Pangborn in the slightest.

  "Get out of here, Sheriff," he whispered. "Get out and leave me alone."

  8

  Alan stood looking into the display window for a long time. He found himself wondering what, exactly, all the shouting was about. He had spoken to Rosalie Drake before going over to Polly's house yesterday evening, and Rosalie had made Needful Things sound like northern New England's answer to Tiffany's, but the set of china in the window didn't look like anything to get up in the night and write home to mother about--it was rummage-sale quality at best. Several of the plates were chipped, and a hairline crack ran right through the center of one.

  Oh well, Alan thought, different strokes for different folks. That china's probably a hundred years old, worth a fortune, and I'm just too dumb to know it.

  He cupped his hands to the glass in order to see beyond the display, but there was nothing to look at--the lights were off and the place was deserted. Then he thought he caught sight of someone--a strange, transparent someone looking out at him with ghostly and malevolent interest. He took half a step backward before realizing it was the reflection of his own face he was seeing. He laughed a little, embarrassed by his mistake.

  He strolled to the door. The shade was drawn; a hand-lettered sign hung from a clear plastic suction cup.

  GONE TO PORTLAND TO RECEIVE A CONSIGNMENT OF GOODS

  SORRY TO HAVE MISSED YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN

  Alan pulled his wallet from his back pocket, removed one of his business cards, and scribbled a brief message on the back.

  Dear Mr. Gaunt,

  I dropped by Saturday morning to say hello and welcome you to town. Sorry to have missed you. Hope you're enjoying Castle Rock! I'll drop by again on Monday. Maybe we could have a cup of coffee. If there's anything I can do for you, my numbers--home and office--are on the other side.

  Alan Pangbom

  He stooped, slid the card under the door, and stood up again. He looked into the display window a moment longer, wondering who would want that set of nondescript dishes. As he looked, a queerly pervasive feeling stole over him--a sense of being watched. Alan turned around and saw no one but Lester Pratt. Lester was putting one of those damned posters up on a telephone pole and not looking in his direction at all. Alan shrugged and headed back down the street toward the Municipal Building. Monday would be time enough to meet Leland Gaunt; Monday would be just fine.

  9

  Mr. Gaunt watched him out of sight, then went to the door and picked up the card Alan had slid beneath. He read both sides carefully, and then began to smile. The Sheriff meant to drop by again on Monday, did he? Well, that was just fine, because Mr. Gaunt had an idea that by the time Monday rolled around, Castle County's Sheriff was going to have other fish to fry. A whole mess of other fish. And that was just as well, because he had met men like Pangborn before, and they were good men to steer clear of, at least while one was still building up one's business and feeling out one's clientele. Men like Pangborn saw too much.

  "Something happened to you, Sheriff," Gaunt said. "Something that's made you even more dangerous than you should be. That's on your face, too. What was it, I wonder? Was it something you did, something you saw, or both?"

  He stood looking out onto the street, and his lips slowly pulled back from his large, uneven teeth. He spoke in the low, comfortable tones of one who has been his own best listener for a very long time.

  "I'm given to understand you're something of a parlor prestidigitator, my uniformed friend. You like tricks. I'm going to show you a few new ones before I leave town. I'm confident they will amaze you."

  He rolled his hand into a fist around Alan's business card, first bending and then crumpling it. When it was completely hidden, a lick of blue fire squirted out from between his second and third fingers. He opened his hand again, and although little tendrils of smoke drifted up from the palm, there was no sign of the card--not even a smear of ash.

  "Say-hey and abracadabra," Gaunt said softly.

  10

  Myrtle Keeton went to the door of her husband's study for the third time that day and listened. When she got out of bed around nine o'clock that morning, Danforth had already been in there with the door locked. Now, at one in the afternoon, he was still in there with the door locked. When she asked him if he wanted some lunch, he told her in a muffled voice to go away, he was busy.

  She raised her hand to knock again ... and paused. She cocked her head slightly. A noise was coming from beyond the door--a grinding, rattling sound. It reminded her of the sounds her mother's cuckoo clock had made during the week before it broke down completely.

  She knocked lightly. "Danforth?"

  "Go away!" His voice was agitated, but she could not tell if the reason was excitement or fear.

  "Danforth, are you all right?"

  "Yes, dammit! Go away! I'll be out soon!"

  Rattle and grind. Grind and rattle. It sounded like dirt in a dough-mixer. It made her a little afraid. She hoped Danforth wasn't having a nervous breakdown in there. He had been acting so strange lately.

  "Danforth, would you like me to go down to the bakery and get some doughnuts?"

  "Yes!" he shouted. "Yes! Yes! Doughnuts! Toilet paper! A nose job! Go anywhere! Get anything! Just leave me alone!"

  She stood a moment longer, troubled. She thought about knocking again and decided not to. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what Danforth was doing in his study. She was no longer sure she even wanted him to open the door.

  She put on her shoes and her heavy fall coat--it was sunny but chilly--and went out to the car. She drove down to The Country Oven at the end of Main Street and got half a dozen doughnuts--honey--glazed for her, chocolate coconut for Danforth. She hoped they would cheer him up--a little chocolate always cheered her up.

  On her way back, she happened to glance in the show window of Needful Things. What she saw caused her to jam both feet down on the brake-pedal, hard. If anyone had been following her, she would have been rammed for sure.

  There was the most gorgeous doll in the window.

  The shade was up again, of course. And the sign hanging from the clear plastic suction cup again read

  OPEN.

  Of course.

  11

  Polly Chalmers spent that Saturday afternoon in what was, for her, a most unusual fashion: by doing nothing at all. She sat by the window in her bentwood Boston rocker with her hands folded neatly in her lap, watching the occasional traffic on the street outside. Alan had called her before going out on patrol, had told her of having missed Leland Gaunt, had asked her if she was all right and if there was anything she needed. She had told him that she was fine and that she didn't need a single thing, thanks. Both of these statements were lies; she was not fine at all and there were several things she needed. A cure for arthritis headed the list.

  No, Polly--what you really need is some courage. Just enough to walk up to the man you love and say, "Alan, I bent the truth in places about the years when I was away from Castle Rock, and I outright lied to you about what happened to my son. Now I'd like to ask your forgiveness and tell you the truth."

  It sounded easy when you stated it baldly like that. It only got hard when you looked the man you loved in the eyes, or when you tried to find the key that would unlock your heart without tearing it into bleeding, painful pieces.

  Pain and lies; lies and pain. The two subjects he
r life seemed to revolve around just lately.

  How are you today, Pol?

  Fine, Alan. I'm fine.

  In fact, she was terrified. It wasn't that her hands were so awfully painful at this very second; she almost wished they did hurt, because the pain, bad as it was when it finally came, was still better than the waiting.

  Shortly after noon today, she had become aware of a warm tingling--almost a vibration--in her hands. It formed rings of heat around her knuckles and at the base of her thumb; she could feel it lurking at the bottom of each fingernail in small, steely arcs like humorless smiles. She had felt this twice before, and knew what it meant. She was going to have what her Aunt Betty, who'd been afflicted with the same sort of arthritis, called a real bad spell. "When my hands start to tingle like electric shocks, I always know it's time to batten down the hatches," Betty had said, and now Polly was trying to batten down her own hatches, with a notable lack of success.

  Outside, two boys walked down the middle of the street, tossing a football back and forth between them. The one on the right--the youngest of the Lawes boys--went up for a high pass. The ball ticked off his fingers and bounced onto Polly's lawn. He saw her looking out the window as he went after it and waved to her. Polly raised her own hand in return ... and felt the pain flare sullenly, like a thick bed of coals in an errant gust of wind. Then it was gone again and there was only that eerie tingling. It felt to her the way the air sometimes felt before a violent electrical storm.

  The pain would come in its own time; she could do nothing about it. The lies she had told Alan about Kelton, though .... that was quite another thing. And, she thought, it's not as though the truth is so awful, so glaring, so shocking ... and it's not as though he doesn't already suspect or even know that you've lied. He does. I've seen it in his face. So why is this so hard, Polly? Why?

  Partially because of the arthritis, she supposed, and partially because of the pain medication she had come to rely on more and more heavily--the two things together had a way of blurring rational thought, of making the clearest and cleanest of right angles look queerly skewed. Then there was the fact of Alan's own pain ... and the honesty with which he had disclosed it. He had laid it out for her inspection without a single hesitation.

  His feelings in the wake of the peculiar accident which had taken Annie's and Todd's lives were confused and ugly, surrounded by an unpleasant (and frightening) swirl of negative emotions, but he had laid them out for her just the same. He had done it because he wanted to find out if she knew things about Annie's state of mind that he did not ... but he had also done it because playing fair and keeping such things in the open were just part of his nature. She was afraid of what he might think when he found out that playing fair wasn't always a part of hers; that her heart as well as her hands had been touched with early frost.

  She stirred uneasily in the chair.

  I have to tell him--sooner or later I have to. And none of that explains why it's so hard; none of that even explains why I told him the lies in the first place. I mean, it isn't as if I killed my son ...

  She sighed--a sound that was almost a sob--and shifted in her chair. She looked for the boys with the football, but they were gone. Polly settled back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  12

  She wasn't the first girl to ever turn up pregnant as the result of a date-night wrestling match, or the first to ever argue bitterly with her parents and other relations as a result. They had wanted her to marry Paul "Duke" Sheehan, the boy who had gotten her pregnant. She had replied that she wouldn't marry Duke if he was the last boy on earth. This was true, but what her pride would not let her tell them was that Duke didn't want to marry her--his closest friend had told her he was already making panicky preparations to join the Navy when he turned eighteen ... which he would do in less than six weeks.

  "Let me get this straight," Newton Chalmers said, and had then torn away the last tenuous bridge between his daughter and himself. "He was good enough to screw, but he's not good enough to marry--is that about right?"

  She had tried to run out of the house then, but her mother had caught her. If she wouldn't marry the boy, Lorraine Chalmers said, speaking in the calm and sweetly reasonable voice that had driven Polly almost to madness as a teenager, then they would have to send her away to Aunt Sarah in Minnesota. She could stay in Saint Cloud until the baby came, then put it up for adoption.

  "I know why you want me to leave," Polly said. "It's Great-aunt Evelyn, isn't it? You're afraid if she finds out I've got a bun in my oven, she'll cut you out of her will. It's all about money, isn't it? You don't care about me at all. You don't give a shit about m--"

  Lorraine Chalmers's sweetly reasonable voice had always masked a jackrabbit temper. She had torn away the last tenuous bridge between her daughter and herself by slapping Polly hard across the face.

  So Polly had run away. That had been a long, long time ago--in July of 1970.

  She stopped running for a while when she got to Denver, and worked there until the baby was born in a charity ward which the patients called Needle Park. She had fully intended to put the child up for adoption, but something--maybe just the feel of him when the maternity nurse had put him in her arms after the delivery--had changed her mind.

  She named the boy Kelton, after her paternal grandfather. The decision to keep the baby had frightened her a little, because she liked to see herself as a practical, sensible girl, and nothing which had happened to her over the last year or so fit that image. First the practical, sensible girl had gotten pregnant out of wedlock in a time when practical, sensible girls simply did not do such things. Then the practical, sensible girl had run away from home and delivered her child in a city where she had never been before and knew nothing about. And to top it all off, the practical, sensible girl had decided to keep the baby and take it with her into a future she could not see, could not even sense.

  At least she had not kept the baby out of spite or defiance; no one could hang that on her. She found herself surprised by love, that simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

  She had moved on. No--they had moved on. She had worked a number of menial jobs, and they had ended up in San Francisco, where she had probably intended to go all along. In that early summer of 1971 it had been a kind of hippie Xanadu, a hilly headshop full of freaks and folkies and yippies and bands with names like Moby Grape and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.

  According to the Scott McKenzie song about San Francisco which had been popular during one of those years, summertime was supposed to be a love-in there. Polly Chalmers, who had been no one's idea of a hippie even back then, had somehow missed the love-in. The building where she and Kelton lived was full of jimmied mailboxes and junkies who wore the peace-sign around their necks and, more often than not, kept switchblades in their scuffed and dirty motorcycle boots. The most common visitors in this neighborhood were process servers, repo men, and cops. A lot of cops, and you didn't call them pigs to their faces; the cops had also missed the love-in, and were pissed about it.

  Polly applied for welfare and found she had not lived in California long enough to qualify--she supposed things might be different now, but in 1971, it had been as hard for a young unwed mother to get along in San Francisco as it was anywhere else. She applied for Aid to Dependent Children, and waited--hoped--for something to come of it. Kelton never missed a meal, but she herself lived hand to mouth, a scrawny young woman who was often hungry and always afraid, a young woman very few of the people who knew her now would have recognized. Her memories of those first three years on the West Coast, memories stored at the back of her mind like old clothes in an attic, were skewed and grotesque, images from a nightmare.

  And wasn't that a large part of her reluctance to tell Alan about those years? Didn't she simply want to keep them dark? She hadn't been the only one who had suffered the nightmare consequences of her pride, her stubborn refusal to ask for help, and the vicious hypocrisy of the times, wh
ich proclaimed the triumph of free love while simultaneously branding unmarried women with babies as creatures beyond the pale of normal society; Kelton had been there as well. Kelton had been her hostage to fortune as she slogged angrily along the track of her sordid fool's crusade.

  The horrible thing was that her situation had been slowly improving. In the spring of 1972 she had finally qualified for state help, her first ADC check had been promised for the following month, and she had been making plans to move into a slightly better place when the fire happened.

  The call had come to her at the diner where she worked, and in her dreams, Norville, the short-order cook who had always been trying to get into her pants in those days, turned to her again and again, holding out the telephone. He said the same thing over and over: Polly, it's the police. They want to talk to you. Polly, it's the police. They want to talk to you.

  They had indeed wanted to talk to her, because they had hauled the bodies of a young woman and a small child from the smoky third floor of the apartment building. They had both been burned beyond recognition. They knew who the child was; if Polly wasn't at work, they would know who the woman was, too.

  For three months after Kelton's death she had gone on working. Her loneliness had been so intense that she was half-mad with it, so deep and complete that she hadn't even been aware of how badly she was suffering. At last she had written home, telling her mother and father only that she was in San Francisco, that she had given birth to a boy, and that the boy was no longer with her. She would not have given further details if she had been threatened with red-hot pokers. Going home had not been a part of her plans then--not her conscious plans, at least--but it began to seem to her that if she did not re-establish some of her old ties, a valuable inside part of her would begin dying by inches, the way a vigorous tree dies from the branches inward when it is deprived of water too long.