Needful Things

by Stephen King

  I only found one item of interest, but that one was a corker. It looked like a map. There were lots of crosses on it, but one of the crosses--the one marking this spot--was marked in red. I put the map back before Pop returned. He never knew I looked at it. I came out here right after he died and dug up this Crisco can. There was better than two hundred thousand dollars in it, Ace. Don't worry, though--I decided to "share and share alike" and am going to leave you exactly what you deserve.

  Welcome back to town, Ace-Hole!

  Yours sincerely,

  Alan Pangborn

  Castle County Sheriff

  P.S.: A word to the wise, Ace: now that you know, "take your lumps" and forget the whole thing. You know the old saying--finders keepers. If you ever try to brace me about your uncle's money, I will tear you a new asshole and stuff your head into it.

  Trust me on this.

  A.P.

  Ace let the sheet of paper slide from his numb fingers and opened the second envelope.

  A single one-dollar bill fell out of it.

  I decided to "share and share alike" and am going to leave you exactly what you deserve.

  "You crab-infested bastard," Ace whispered, and picked up the dollar bill with shaking fingers.

  Welcome back to town, Ace-Hole!

  "You SON OF A WHORE!" Ace screamed so loudly that he felt something in his throat strain and almost rupture. The echo came back dimly: . . . whore . . . whore ... whore ...

  He began to tear the dollar up, then forced his fingers to relax.

  Huh-uh. No way, Jose.

  He was going to save this. The son of a bitch had wanted Pop's money, had he? He had stolen what rightfully belonged to Pop's last living relative, had he? Well, all right. Good. Fine. But he should have all of it. And Ace intended to see that the Sheriff had just that. So, after he removed Pusbag's testicles with his pocket-knife, he intended to stuff this dollar bill into the bloody hole where they had been.

  "You want the money, Daddy-O?" Ace asked in a soft, musing voice. "Okay. That's okay. No problem. No ... fucking ... problem."

  He got to his feet and began walking back toward the car in a stiff, staggering version of his usual hood strut.

  By the time he got there, he was almost running.

  PART THREE

  EVERYTHING MUST GO

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1

  By quarter to six, a weird twilight had begun to creep over Castle Rock; thunderheads were stacking up on the southern horizon. Low, distant boomings muttered over the woods and fields from that direction. The clouds were moving toward town, growing as they came. The streetlights, governed by a master photoelectric cell, came on a full half hour earlier than they usually did at that time of year.

  Lower Main Street was a crowded confusion. It had been overrun by State Police vehicles and TV newsvans. Radio calls crackled and entwined in the hot, still air. TV technicians paid out cable and yelled at the people--kids, mostly--who tripped over the loose lengths of it before they could anchor it temporarily to the pavement with duct tape. Photographers from four daily papers stood outside the barricades in front of the Municipal Building and took stills which would appear on front pages the following day. A few locals--surprisingly few, if anyone had bothered to notice such things--rubbernecked. A TV correspondent stood in the glare of a hi-intensity lamp and taped his report with the Municipal Building in the background. "A senseless wave of violence swished through Castle Rock this afternoon," he began, then stopped. "Swished?" he asked himself disgustedly. "Shit, let's take it again from the top." To his left, a TV-dude from another station was watching his crew prepare for what would be a live feed in less than twenty minutes. More of the onlookers had been drawn to the familiar faces of the TV correspondents than to the barricades, where there had been nothing to see since two orderlies from Medical Assistance had brought out the unfortunate Lester Pratt in a black plastic bag, loaded him into the back of their ambulance, and driven away.

  Upper Main, away from the blue strobes of the State Police cruisers and the bright pools of the TV lights, was almost entirely deserted.

  Almost.

  Every now and then a car or a pick-up truck would park in one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. Every now and then a pedestrian would saunter up to the new shop, where the display lights were off and the shade was pulled down on the door under the canopy. Every now and then one of the rubberneckers on Lower Main would break away from the shifting knot of onlookers and walk up the street, past the vacant lot where the Emporium Galorium had once stood, past You Sew and Sew, closed and dark, to the new store.

  No one noticed this trickle of visitors--not the police, not the camera crews, not the correspondents, not the majority of the bystanders. They were looking at THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and their backs were turned to the place where, less than three hundred yards away, the crime was still going on.

  If some disinterested observer had been keeping an eye on Needful Things, he or she would have quickly detected a pattern. The visitors approached. The visitors saw the sign in the window which read

  CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  The visitors stepped back, identical expressions of frustration and distress on their faces--they looked like hurting junkies who had discovered the pusherman wasn't where he'd promised to be. What do I do now? their faces said. Most stepped forward to read the sign again, as if a second, closer scrutiny would somehow change the message.

  A few got into their cars and left or wandered down toward the Municipal Building to stare at the free show for a while, looking dazed and vaguely disappointed. On the faces of most, however, an expression of sudden comprehension dawned. They had the look of people suddenly understanding some basic concept, like how to diagram simple sentences or reduce a pair of fractions to their lowest common denominator.

  These people walked around the comer to the service alley which ran behind the business buildings on Main Street--the alley where Ace had parked the Tucker Talisman the night before.

  Forty feet down, an oblong of yellow light fell out of an open door and across the patched concrete. This light grew slowly brighter as day slipped into evening. A shadow lay in the center of the oblong, like a silhouette cut from mourner's crepe. The shadow belonged, of course, to Leland Gaunt.

  He had placed a table in the doorway. On it was a Roi-Tan cigar box. He put the money which his customers tendered into this box and made change from it. These patrons approached hesitantly, even fearfully in some cases, but all of them had one thing in common: they were angry people with heavy grudges to tote. A few--not many--turned away before they reached Mr. Gaunt's makeshift counter. Some went running, with the wide eyes of men and women who have glimpsed a frightful fiend licking its chops in the shadows. Most, however, stayed to do business. And as Mr. Gaunt bantered with them, treating this odd back-door commerce as an amusing diversion at the end of a long day, they relaxed.

  Mr. Gaunt had enjoyed his shop, but he never felt so comfortable behind plate-glass and under a roof as he did here, on the edge of the air, with the first breezes of the coming storm stirring his hair. The shop, with its clever display lights on ceiling-mounted tracks, was all right ... but this was better. This was always better.

  He had begun business many years ago--as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the Plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slat-thin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer's heart. He had sold his wares from the back of the wagon ... and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought.

  Times changed; methods changed; faces, too. But when the faces were needful they were alway
s the same, the faces of sheep who have lost their shepherd, and it was with this sort of commerce that he felt most at home, most like that wandering peddler of old, standing not behind a fancy counter with a Sweda cash register nearby but behind a plain wooden table, making change out of a cigar-box and selling them the same item over and over and over again.

  The goods which had so attracted the residents of Castle Rock--the black pearls, the holy relics, the carnival glass, the pipes, the old comic books, the baseball cards, the antique kaleidoscopes--were all gone. Mr. Gaunt had gotten down to his real business, and at the end of things, the real business was always the same. The ultimate item had changed with the years, just like everything else, but such changes were surface things, frosting of different flavors on the same dark and bitter cake.

  At the end, Mr. Gaunt always sold them weapons ... and they always bought.

  "Why, thank you, Mr. Warburton!" Mr. Gaunt said, taking a five-dollar bill from the black janitor. He handed him back a single and one of the automatic pistols Ace had brought from Boston.

  "Thank you, Miss Milliken!" He took ten and gave back eight.

  He charged them what they could afford--not a penny more or a penny less. Each according to his means was Mr. Gaunt's motto, and never mind each according to his needs, because they were all needful things, and he had come here to fill their emptiness and end their aches.

  "Good to see you, Mr. Emerson!"

  Oh, it was always good, so very good, to be doing business in the old way again. And business had never been better.

  2

  Alan Pangborn wasn't in Castle Rock. While the reporters and the State Police gathered at one end of Main Street and Leland Gaunt conducted his going-out-of-business sale halfway up the hill, Alan was sitting at the nurses' station of the Blumer Wing in Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.

  The Blumer Wing was small--only fourteen patient rooms--but what it lacked in size it made up for in color. The walls of the inpatient rooms were painted in bright primary shades. A mobile hung from the ceiling in the nurses' station, the birds depending from it swinging and dipping gracefully around a central spindle.

  Alan was sitting in front of a huge mural which depicted a medley of Mother Goose rhymes. One section of the mural showed a man leaning across a table, holding something out to a small boy, obviously a hick, who looked both frightened and fascinated. Something about this particular image had struck Alan, and a snatch of childhood rhyme rose like a whisper in his mind: Simple Simon met a pie-man

  going to the fair.

  "Simple Simon," said the pie-man,

  "come and taste my wares!"

  A ripple of gooseflesh had broken out on Alan's arms--tiny bumps like beads of cold sweat. He couldn't say why, and that seemed perfectly normal. Never in his entire life had he felt as shaken, as scared, as deeply confused as he did right now. Something totally beyond his ability to understand was happening in Castle Rock. It had become clearly apparent only late this afternoon, when everything had seemed to blow sky-high at once, but it had begun days, maybe even a week, ago. He didn't know what it was, but he knew that Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck had been only the first outward signs.

  And he was terribly afraid that things were still progressing while he sat here with Simple Simon and the pie-man.

  A nurse, Miss Hendrie according to the small name-plate on her breast, walked up the corridor on faintly squeaking crepe soles. weaving her way gracefully among the toys which littered the hall. When Alan came in, half a dozen kids, some with limbs in casts or slings, some with the partial baldness he associated with chemotherapy treatments, had been playing in the hall, trading blocks and trucks, shouting amiably to each other. Now it was the supper hour, and they had gone either down to the cafeteria or back to their rooms.

  "How is he?" Alan asked Miss Hendrie.

  "No change." She looked at Alan with a calm expression which contained an element of hostility. "Sleeping. He should be sleeping. He has had a great shock."

  "What do you hear from his parents?"

  "We called the father's place of employment in South Paris. He had an installation job over in New Hampshire this afternoon. He's left for home, I understand, and will be informed when he arrives. He should get here around nine, I would think, but of course it's impossible to tell."

  "What about the mother?"

  "I don't know," Miss Hendrie said. The hostility was more apparent now, but it was no longer aimed at Alan. "I didn't make that call. All I know is what I see--she's not here. This little boy saw his brother commit suicide with a rifle, and although it happened at home, the mother is not here yet. You'll have to excuse me now--I have to fill the med-cart."

  "Of course," Alan muttered. He watched her as she started away, then rose from his chair. "Miss Hendrie?"

  She turned to him. Her eyes were still calm, but her raised brows expressed annoyance.

  "Miss Hendrie, I really do need to talk with Sean Rusk. I think I need to talk to him very badly."

  "Oh?" Her voice was cool.

  "Something--" Alan suddenly thought of Polly and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat and pushed on. "Something is going on in my town. The suicide of Brian Rusk is only part of it, I believe. And I also believe that Sean Rusk may have the key to the rest of it."

  "Sheriff Pangborn, Sean Rusk is only seven years old. And if he does know something, why aren't there other policemen here?"

  Other policemen, he thought. What she means are qualified policemen. Policemen who don't interview eleven-year-old boys on the street and then send them home to commit suicide in the garage.

  "Because they've got their hands full," Alan said, "and because they don't know the town the way I do."

  "I see." She turned to go again.

  "Miss Hendrie."

  "Sheriff, I'm short-handed this evening and very b--"

  "Brian Rusk wasn't the only Castle Rock fatality today. There were at least three others. Another man, the owner of the local tavern, has been taken to the hospital in Norway with gunshot trauma. He may live, but it's going to be touch and go with him for the next thirty-six hours or so. And I have a hunch the killing isn't done."

  He had finally succeeded in capturing all of her attention.

  "You believe Sean Rusk knows something about this?"

  "He may know why his brother killed himself. If he does, that may open up the rest of it. So if he wakes up, will you tell me?"

  She hesitated, then said, "That depends on his mental state when he does, Sheriff. I'm not going to allow you to make a hysterical little boy's condition worse, no matter what is going on in your town."

  "I understand."

  "Do you? Good." She gave him a look which said, Just sit there and don't make trouble for me, then, and went back behind the high desk. She sat down, and he could hear her putting bottles and boxes on the med-cart.

  Alan got up, went to the pay phone in the hall, and dialled Polly's number again. And once again it simply rang on and on. He dialled You Sew and Sew, got the answering machine, and racked the phone. He went back to his chair, sat in it, and stared at the Mother Goose mural some more.

  You forgot to ask me one question, Miss Hendrie, Alan thought. You forgot to ask me why I'm here if there's so much going on in the seat of the county I was elected to preserve and protect. You forgot to ask me why I'm not leading the investigation while some less essential officer--old Seat Thomas, for instance--sits here, waiting for Sean Rusk to wake up. You forgot to ask those things, Miss Hendrie, and I know a secret. I'm glad you forgot. That's the secret.

  The reason was as simple as it was humiliating. Except in Portland and Bangor, murder belonged not to the Sheriff's Office but to the State Police. Henry Payton had winked at that in the wake of Nettie and Wilma's duel, but he was not winking anymore. He couldn't afford to. Representatives of every southern Maine newspaper and TV station were either in Castle Rock right now or on their way. They would be joined by their colleagues from all
over the state before very much longer . . . and if this really was not over, as Alan suspected, they would shortly be joined by more media people from points south.

  That was the simple reality of the situation, but it didn't change the way Alan felt. He felt like a pitcher who can't get the job done and is sent to the showers by the coach. It was an indescribably shitty way to feel. He sat in front of Simple Simon and once again began to add up the score.

  Lester Pratt, dead. He had come to the Sheriff's Office in a jealous frenzy and had attacked John LaPointe. It was over his girl, apparently, although John had told Alan before the ambulance came that he had not dated Sally Ratcliffe in over a year. "I only thaw her to thpeek to wunth in awhile on the thtreet, and even then thee cut me dead motht of the time. Thee dethided I'm one of the hellbound." He had touched his broken nose and winced. "Right now I feel hellbound."

  John was now hospitalized in Norway with a broken nose, a fractured jaw, and possible internal injuries.

  Sheila Brigham was also in the hospital. Shock.

  Hugh Priest and Billy Tupper were both dead. That news had come in just as Sheila was beginning to fall apart. The call came from a beer deliveryman, who'd had the sense to call Medical Assistance before calling the Sheriff. The man had been almost as hysterical as Sheila Brigham, and Alan hadn't blamed him. By then he had been feeling pretty hysterical himself.

  Henry Beaufort, in critical condition as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.

  Norris Ridgewick, missing ... and that somehow hurt the most.

  Alan had looked around for him after receiving the deliveryman's call, but Norris was just gone. Alan had assumed at the time that he must have gone outside to formally arrest Danforth and would return with the Head Selectman in tow, but events shortly proved that no one had arrested Keeton. Alan supposed the Staties would arrest him if they ran across him while they pursued other lines of investigation, but otherwise, no. They had more important things to do. In the meantime, Norris was just gone. Wherever he was, he'd gotten there on foot; when Alan left town, Norris's VW had still been lying on its side in the middle of Lower Main Street.