Needful Things

by Stephen King

  "I warned you!"

  "Stick your warning up your old dirt road!"

  "I'm going to kill you!"

  "Take one step and someone's going to die here, all right, but it won't be me!"

  Wilma spoke these words with alarm and dawning surprise; Nettie's face made her realize for the first time that the two of them might be about to engage in something a little more serious than pulling hair or ripping clothes. What was Nettie doing here in the first place? What had happened to the element of surprise? How had things come so quickly to the sticking point?

  But there was a deep streak of Polish Cossack in Wilma's nature, a part that found such questions irrelevant. There was a battle to be fought here; that was the important thing.

  Nettie ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat.

  Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade. As Nettie closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettie's bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment's horror at what she had done--could it really be Wilma Jerzyck on the other end of the steel buried in Nettie?--and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife's upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettie's frantically pumping heart.

  "OOOOH YOU BIIIITCH!" Nettie screamed, and brought the cleaver down. It buried itself to the hilt in Wilma's shoulder, splitting the collarbone with a dull crunch.

  The pain, a huge wooden plank of it, drove any objective thought from Wilma's mind. Only the raving Cossack was left. She yanked her knife free.

  Nettie yanked her cleaver free. It took both hands to do it, and when she finally succeeded in wrenching it off the bone, a loose slew of guts slipped from the bloody hole in her dress and hung before her in a glistening knot.

  The two women circled slowly, their feet printing tracks in their own blood. The sidewalk began to look like some weird Arthur Murray dance diagram. Nettie felt the world beginning to pulse in and out in great, slow cycles--the color would drain from things, leaving her in a blur of whiteness, and then it would slowly come back. She heard her heart in her ears, great slow snaffling thuds. She knew she was wounded but felt no pain. She thought Wilma might have cut her a little in the side, or something.

  Wilma knew how badly she was hurt; was aware that she could no longer lift her right arm and that the back of her dress was drenched with blood. She had no intention of even trying to run away, however. She had never run in her life, and she wasn't going to start now.

  "Hi!" someone screamed thinly at them from across the street. "Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is! You stop it right now or I'll call the police!"

  Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettie stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma's hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.

  "Hi! Hi!" It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were magnified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice: "Help! Police! Murder! MURRRDURRRRR!"

  The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice. Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettie staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward.

  "Come on, you bitch," she snarled. "Come for me, if you're coming."

  Nettie came, her mouth working. The ball of her intestines swung back and forth against her dress like a misborn fetus. Her right foot struck Wilma's outstretched left foot and she fell forward. The carving knife impaled her just below the breastbone. She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jerzyck's head with a single dull sound--chonk! Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettie's. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.

  "Killed ... my ... doggy," Nettie gasped, spitting a fine mist of blood into Wilma's upturned face with every word. Then she shuddered all over and went limp. Her head bonked the post of the stop-sign as it fell forward.

  Wilma's jittering foot slid into the gutter. Her good black for-church shoe flew off and landed in a pile of leaves with its low heel pointing up at the bustling clouds. Her toes flexed once ... once more ... and then relaxed.

  The two women lay draped over each other like lovers, their blood painting the cinnamon-colored leaves in the gutter.

  "MURRRRRDURRRRRR!" the old woman across the street trumpeted again, and then she rocked backward and fell full-length on her own hall floor in a faint.

  Others in the neighborhood were coming to windows and opening doors now, asking each other what had happened, stepping out on stoops and lawns, first approaching the scene cautiously, then backing away in a hurry, hands over mouths, when they saw not only what had happened, but the gory extent of it.

  Eventually, someone called the Sheriff's Office.

  18

  Polly Chalmers was walking slowly up Main Street toward Needful Things with her aching hands bundled into her warmest pair of mittens when she heard the first police siren. She stopped and watched as one of the county's three brown Plymouth cruisers belted through the intersection of Main and Laurel, lights flashing and twirling. It was doing fifty already and still accelerating. It was closely followed by a second cruiser.

  She watched them out of sight, frowning. Sirens and racing police cruisers were a rarity in The Rock. She wondered what had happened--something a little more serious than a cat up a tree, she supposed. Alan would tell her when he called that evening.

  Polly looked up the street again and saw Leland Gaunt standing in the doorway of his shop, also watching after the cruisers with an expression of mild curiosity on his face. Well, that answered one question: he was in. Nettie had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn't surprised Polly much; the surface of Nettie's mind was slippery, and things had a way of sliding right off.

  She walked on up the street. Mr. Gaunt looked around and saw her. His face lit up in a smile.

  "Ms. Chalmers! How nice that you could drop by!"

  She smiled wanly. The pain, which had abated for a while that morning, was now creeping back, thrusting its network of thin, cruel wires through the flesh of her hands. "I thought we'd agreed on Polly."

  "Polly, then. Come inside--it's awfully good to see you. What's all the excitement?"

  "I don't know," she said. He held the door for her and she went past him into the shop. "I suppose someone's been hurt and needs to go to the hospital. Medical Assistance in Norway is awfully slow on the weekends. Although why the dispatcher would send two cruisers ..."

  Mr. Gaunt closed the door behind them. The bell tinkled. The shade on the door was down, and with the sun now going the other way, the interior of Needful Things was gloomy ... but, Polly thought, if gloom could ever be pleasant, this gloom was. A small reading lamp shed a golden circle on the counter by Mr. Gaunt's old-fashioned cash register. A book lay open there. It was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Mr. Gaunt was looking at her closely, and Polly had to smile again at the expression of concern in his eyes.

  "My hands have been kicking up the very dickens these last few days," she said. "I guess I don't exactly look like Demi Moore."

  "You look like a woman who is very tired and in quite a lot of discomfort," he said.

  The smile on her face wavered. There was understanding and deep compassion in his voice, and for a moment Polly was afraid she might burst into tears. The thought which kept the tears at bay was an odd one: His hands. If I cry, he'll try to comfort me. He'll put his h
ands on me.

  She buttressed the smile.

  "I'll survive; I always have. Tell me--did Nettie Cobb happen to drop by?"

  "Today?" He frowned. "No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It's not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?"

  "Oh ... no reason," Polly said. "She said she might, but Nettie ... Nettie often forgets things."

  "She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life," Mr. Gaunt said gravely.

  "Yes. Yes, she has." Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, fine," Polly said, but it was a lie--she wasn't even within shouting distance of fine.

  Mr. Gaunt clearly understood this. "You're not well," he said decisively. "Therefore I'm going to dispense with the small-talk. The item which I wrote you about did come in. I'm going to give it to you and send you home."

  "Give it to me?"

  "Oh, I'm not offering you a present," he said as he went behind the cash register. "We hardly know each other well enough for that, do we?"

  She smiled. He was clearly a kind man, a man who, naturally enough, wanted to do something nice for the first person in Castle Rock who had done something nice for him. But she was having a hard time responding--was having a hard time even following the conversation. The pain in her hands was monstrous. She now wished she hadn't come, and, kindness or no kindness, all she wanted to do was get out and go home and take a pain-pill.

  "This is the sort of item a vendor has to offer on trial--if he's an ethical man, that is." He produced a ring of keys, selected one, and unlocked the drawer under the cash register. "If you try it for a couple of days and discover it is worthless to you--and I have to tell you that will probably be the case--you return it to me. If, on the other hand, you find it provides you with some relief, we can talk price." He smiled at her. "And for you, the price would be rock-bottom, I can assure you."

  She looked at him, puzzled. Relief? What was he talking about?

  He brought out a small white box and set it on the counter. He took off the lid with his odd, long-fingered hands, and removed a small silver object on a fine chain from the cotton batting inside. It seemed to be a necklace of some sort, but the thing which hung down when Mr. Gaunt tented his fingers over the chain looked like a tea-ball, or an oversized thimble.

  "This is Egyptian, Polly. Very old. Not as old as the Pyramids--gosh, no!--but still very old. There's something inside it. Some sort of herb, I think, although I'm not sure." He wiggled his fingers up and down. The silver tea-ball (if that was what it was) jounced at the bottom of the chain. Something shifted inside, something which made a dusty, slithery sound. Polly found it vaguely unpleasant.

  "It's called an azka, or perhaps an azakah," Mr. Gaunt said. "Either way, it's an amulet which is supposed to ward off pain."

  Polly tried a smile. She wanted to be polite, but really ... she had come all the way down here for this? The thing didn't even have any aesthetic value. It was ugly, not to put too fine a point on it.

  "I really don't think ..."

  "I don't, either," he said, "but desperate situations often call for desperate measures. I assure you it is quite genuine ... at least in the sense that it wasn't made in Taiwan. It is an authentic Egyptian artifact--not quite a relic, but an artifact most certainly--from the period of the Later Decline. It comes with a certificate of provenance which identifies it as a tool of benka-litis, or white magic. I want you to take it and wear it. I suppose it sounds silly. Probably it is. But there are stranger things in heaven and earth than some of us dream of, even in our wilder moments of philosophy."

  "Do you really believe that?" Polly asked.

  "Yes. I've seen things in my time that make a healing medallion or amulet look perfectly ordinary." A fugitive gleam flickered momentarily in his hazel eyes. "Many such things. The world's odd comers are filled with fabulous junk, Polly. But never mind that; you are the issue here.

  "Even the other day, when I suspect the pain was not nearly as bad as it is right now, I got a good idea of just how unpleasant your situation had become. I thought this little ... item ... might be worth a try. After all, what have you to lose? Nothing else you've tried has worked, has it?"

  "I appreciate the thought, Mr. Gaunt, really I do, but--"

  "Leland. Please."

  "Yes, all right. I appreciate the thought, Leland, but I'm afraid I'm not superstitious."

  She looked up and saw his bright hazel eyes were fixed upon her.

  "It doesn't matter if you are or not, Pofly ... because this is." He wiggled his fingers. The azka bobbed gently at the end of its chain.

  She opened her mouth again, but this time no words came out. She found herself remembering a day last spring. Nettie had forgotten her copy of Inside View when she went home. Leafing through it idly, glancing at stories about werewolf babies in Cleveland and a geological formation on the moon that looked like the face of JFK, Pofly had come upon an ad for something called The Prayer Dial of the Ancients. It was supposed to cure headaches, stomach aches, and arthritis.

  The ad was dominated by a black-and-white drawing. It showed a fellow with a long beard and a wizard's hat (either Nostradamus or Gandalf, Polly assumed) holding something that looked like a child's pinwheel over the body of a man in a wheelchair. The pinwheel gadget was casting a cone of radiance over the invalid, and although the ad did not come right out and say so, the implication seemed to be that the guy would be dancing up a storm at the Copa in a night or two. It was ridiculous, of course, superstitious pap for people whose minds had wavered or perhaps even broken under a steady onslaught of pain and disability, but still ...

  She had sat looking at that ad for a long time, and, ridiculous as it was, she had almost called the 800 number for phone orders given at the bottom of the page. Because sooner or later--

  "Sooner or later a person in pain should explore even the more questionable paths, if it's possible those paths might lead to relief," Mr. Gaunt said. "Isn't that so?"

  "I ... I don't ..."

  "Cold therapy ... thermal gloves ... even the radiation treatments ... none of them have worked for you, have they?"

  "How do you know about all that?"

  "A good tradesman makes it his business to know the needs of his customers," Mr. Gaunt said in his soft, hypnotic voice. He moved toward her, holding the silver chain out in a wide ring with the azka hanging at the bottom. She shrank from the long hands with their leathery nails.

  "Fear not, dear lady. I'll not touch the least hair upon your head. Not if you're calm ... and remain quite still ..."

  And Polly did become calm. She did become still. She stood with her hands (still encased in the woolly mittens) crossed demurely in front of her, and allowed Mr. Gaunt to drop the silver chain over her head. He did it with the gentleness of a father turning down his daughter's bridal veil. She felt far away from Mr. Gaunt, from Needful Things, from Castle Rock, even from herself. She felt like a woman standing high on some dusty plain and under an endless sky, hundreds of miles from any other human being.

  The azka dropped against the zipper of her leather car-coat with a small clink.

  "Put it inside your jacket. And when you get home, put it inside your blouse, as well. It must be worn next to the skin for maximum effect."

  "I can't put it in my jacket," Polly said in slow, dreaming tones. "The zipper ... I can't pull down the zipper."

  "No? Try."

  So Polly stripped off one of the mittens and tried. To her great surprise, she found she was able to flex the thumb and first finger of her right hand just enough to grasp the zipper's tab and pull it down.

  "There, you see?"

  The little silver ball fell
against the front of her blouse. It seemed very heavy to her, and the feel of it was not precisely comfortable. She wondered vaguely what was inside it, what had made that dusty slithery sound. Some sort of herb, he had said, but it hadn't sounded like leaves or even powder to Polly. It had seemed to her that something in there had shifted on its own.

  Mr. Gaunt seemed to understand her discomfort. "You'll get used to it, and much sooner than you might think. Believe me, you will."

  Outside, thousands of miles away, she heard more sirens. They sounded like troubled spirits.

  Mr. Gaunt turned away, and as his eyes left her face, Polly felt her concentration begin to return. She felt a little bewildered, but she also felt good. She felt as if she had just had a short but satisfying nap. Her sense of mixed discomfort and disquiet was gone.

  "My hands still hurt," she said, and this was true ... but did they hurt as badly? It seemed to her there had been some relief, but that could be nothing more than suggestion--she had a feeling that Gaunt had imposed a kind of hypnosis on her in his determination to make her accept the azka. Or it might only be the warmth of the shop after the cold outside.

  "I doubt very much if the promised effect is instantaneous," Mr. Gaunt said dryly. "Give it a chance, though--will you do that, Polly?"

  She shrugged. "All right."

  After all, what did she have to lose? The ball was small enough so it would barely make a bulge under a blouse and a sweater. She wouldn't have to answer any questions about it if no one knew it was there, and that would be just fine with her--Rosalie Drake would be curious, and Alan, who was about as superstitious as a tree-stump, would probably find it funny. As for Nettie ... well, Nettie would probably be awed to silence if she knew Polly was wearing an honest-to-goodness magic charm, just like the ones they sold in her beloved Inside View.

  "You shouldn't take it off, not even in the shower," Mr. Gaunt said. "There's no need to. The ball is real silver, and won't rust."

  "But if I do?"

  He coughed gently into his hand, as if embarrassed. "Well, the beneficial effect of the azka is cumulative. The wearer is a little better today, a little better still tomorrow, and so on. That's what I was told, at least."