Needful Things by Stephen King
And he was not going to give it up.
No way, uh-uh, negatory.
Then you better finish paying for it, a voice deep in his mind whispered.
He would. No problem there. He didn't think the thing he was supposed to do was exactly nice, but he was pretty sure it wasn't anything totally gross, either. Just a ...a...
Just a prank, a voice whispered in his mind, and he saw the eyes of Mr. Gaunt--dark blue, like the sea on a clear day, and strangely soothing. That's all. Just a little prank.
Yeah, just a prank, whatever it was.
No problem.
He settled deeper under his goosedown quilt, turned over on his side, closed his eyes, and immediately began to doze.
Something occurred to him as he and his brother sleep drew closer to each other. Something Mr. Gaunt had said. You will be a better advertisement than the local paper could ever THINK of being! Only he couldn't show the wonderful card he had bought. If a little thought had made that obvious to him, an eleven-year-old kid who wasn't even bright enough to keep out of Hugh Priest's way when he was crossing the street, shouldn't a smart guy like Mr. Gaunt have seen it, too?
Well, maybe. But maybe not. Grownups didn't think the same as normal people, and besides, he had the card, didn't he? And it was in his book, right where it should be, wasn't it?
The answer to both questions was yes, and so Brian let go of the whole thing and went back to sleep as the rain pelted against his window and the restless fall wind screamed in the angles beneath the eaves.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
The rain had stopped by daylight on Thursday, and by ten-thirty, when Polly looked out the front window of You Sew and Sew and saw Nettie Cobb, the clouds were beginning to break up. Nettie was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, and went scuttling along Main Street with her purse clamped under her arm as if she sensed the jaws of some new storm opening just behind her.
"How are your hands this morning, Polly?" Rosalie Drake asked.
Polly sighed inwardly. She would have to field the same question, but more insistently put, from Alan that afternoon, she supposed--she had promised to meet him for coffee at Nan's Luncheonette around three. You couldn't fool the people who had known you for a long time. They saw the pallor of your face and the dark crescents below your eyes. More important, they saw the haunted look in the eyes.
"Much better today, thanks," she said. This was overstating the truth by more than a little; they were better, but much better? Huh-uh.
"I thought with the rain and all--"
"It's unpredictable, what makes them hurt. That's the pure devil of it. But never mind that, Rosalie, come quick and look out the window. I think we're about to witness a minor miracle."
Rosalie joined Polly at the window in time to see the small, scuttling figure with the umbrella clutched tightly in one hand--possibly for use as a bludgeon, judging from the way it was now being held--approach the awning of Needful Things.
"Is that Nettie? Is it really?" Rosalie almost gasped.
"It really is."
"My God, she's going in!"
But for a moment it seemed that Rosalie's prediction had queered the deal. Nettie approached the door ... then pulled back. She shifted the umbrella from hand to hand and looked at the facade of Needful Things as if it were a snake which might bite her.
"Go on, Nettie," Polly said softly. "Go for it, sweetie!"
"The CLOSED sign must be in the window," Rosalie said.
"No, he's got another one that says TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I saw it when I came in this morning."
Nettie was approaching the door again. She reached for the knob, then drew back again.
"God, this is killing me," Rosalie said. "She told me she might come back, and I know how much she likes carnival glass, but I never really thought she'd go through with it."
"She asked me if it would be all right for her to leave the house on her break so she could come down to what she called 'that new place' and pick up my cake-box," Polly murmured.
Rosalie nodded. "That's our Nettie. She used to ask me for permission to use the John."
"I got an idea part of her was hoping I'd say no, there was too much to do. But I think part of her wanted me to say yes, too."
Polly's eyes never left the fierce, small-scale struggle going on less than forty yards away, a mini-war between Nettie Cobb and Nettie Cobb. If she actually did go in, what a step forward that would be for her!
Polly felt dull, hot pain in her hands, looked down, and saw she had been twisting them together. She forced them down to her sides.
"It's not the cake-box and it's not the carnival glass," Rosalie said. "It's him."
Polly glanced at her.
Rosalie laughed and blushed a little. "Oh, I don't mean Nettie's got the hots for him, or anything like that, although she did look a little starry-eyed when I caught up with her outside. He was nice to her, Polly. That's all. Honest and nice."
"Lots of people are nice to her," Polly said. "Alan goes out of his way to be kind to her, and she still shies away from him."
"Our Mr. Gaunt has got a special kind of nice," Rosalie said simply, and as if to prove this, they saw Nettie grasp the knob and turn it. She opened the door and then only stood there on the sidewalk clutching her umbrella, as if the shallow well of her resolve had been utterly exhausted. Polly felt a sudden certainty that Nettie would now pull the door closed again and hurry away. Her hands, arthritis or no arthritis, closed into loose fists.
Go on, Nettie. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.
Then Nettie smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest ... and went inside.
The door closed behind her.
Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.
"Way to go, Nettie!" Rosalie said.
"Two points for our side!" Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.
2
Five minutes later, Nettie Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers's cake container on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettie Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop. Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.
"A deed," she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr. Gaunt's more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.
"Yes, that's right. It's really just a small matter. You know Mr. Keeton, don't you?"
"Oh yes," Nettie said. "Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?"
"The younger," Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. "The Head Selectman."
"They call him Buster behind his back," Nettie said, and giggled. It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettie's not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. "They have ever since he was a little boy."
"I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster."
"Trick?" Nettie looked vaguely alarmed.
Gaunt smiled. "Just a harmless prank. And he'll never know it was you. He'll think it was someone else."
"Oh." Nettie looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and
"It will be all right, Nettie. No one will ever know ... and you'll have the lampshade."
Nettie spoke slowly and thoughtfully. "My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else." She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm. "If it doesn't hurt him. I don't want to hurt him. I hurt my husband, you know."
"It won't hurt him," Gaunt said softly, stroking Nettie's hands. "It won't hurt him a bit. I just want you to put some things in his house."
"How could I get in Buster's--"
"Here."
He put something into her hand. A key. She closed her hand over it.
"When?" Nettie asked. Her dreaming eyes had returned to the lampshade again.
"Soon." He released her hands and stood up. "And now, Nettie, I really ought to put that beautiful lampshade into a box for you. Mrs. Martin is coming to look at some Lalique in--" He glanced at his watch. "Goodness, in fifteen minutes! But I can't begin to tell you how glad I am that you decided to come in. Very few people appreciate the beauty of carnival glass these days--most people are just dealers, with cash registers for hearts."
Nettie also stood, and looked at the lampshade with the soft eyes of a woman who is in love. The agonized nervousness with which she had approached the shop had entirely disappeared. "It is lovely, isn't it?"
"Very lovely," Mr. Gaunt agreed warmly. "And I can't tell you ... can't even begin to express ... how happy it makes me to know it will have a good home, a place where someone will do more than dust it on Wednesday afternoons and then, after years of that, break it in a careless moment and sweep the pieces up and then drop them into the trash without a second thought."
"I'd never do that!" Nettie cried.
"I know you wouldn't," Mr. Gaunt said. "It's one of your charms, Netitia."
Nettie looked at him, amazed. "How did you know my name?"
"I have a flair for them. I never forget a name or a face."
He went through the curtain at the back of his shop. When he returned, he held a flat sheet of white cardboard in one hand and a large fluff of tissue paper in the other. He set the tissue paper down beside the cake container (it began at once to expand, with secret little ticks and snaps, into something which looked like a giant corsage) and began to fold the cardboard into a box exactly the right size for the lampshade. "I know you'll be a fine custodian of the item you have purchased. That's why I sold it to you."
"Really? I thought ... Mr. Keeton ... and the trick ...
"No, no, no!" Mr. Gaunt said, half-laughing and half-exasperated. "Anyone will play a trick! People love to play tricks! But to place objects with people who love them and need them ... that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Sometimes, Netitia, I think that what I really sell is happiness ... what do you think?"
"Well," Nettie said earnestly, "I know you've made me happy, Mr. Gaunt. Very happy."
He exposed his crooked, jostling teeth in a wide smile. "Good! That's good!" Mr. Gaunt pushed the tissue-paper corsage into the box, cradled the lampshade in its ticking whiteness, closed the box, and taped it shut with a flourish. "And here we are! Another satisfied customer has found her needful thing!"
He held the box out to her. Nettie took it. And as her fingers touched his she felt a shiver of revulsion, although she had gripped them with great strength--even ardor--a few moments ago. But that interlude had already begun to seem hazy and unreal. He put the Tupperware cake container on top of the white box. She saw something inside the former.
"What's that?"
"A note for your employer," Gaunt said.
Alarm rose to Nettie's face at once. "Not about me?"
"Good heavens, no!" Gaunt said, laughing, and Nettie relaxed at once. When he was laughing, Mr. Gaunt was impossible to resist or distrust. "Take care of your lampshade, Netitia, and do come again."
"I will," Nettie said, and this could have been an answer to both admonitions, but she felt in her heart (that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car) that, while she might come here again, the lampshade was the only thing she would ever buy in Needful Things.
Yet what of that? It was a beautiful thing, the sort of thing she had always wanted, the only thing she needed to complete her modest collection. She considered telling Mr. Gaunt that her husband might still be alive if he had not smashed a carnival glass lampshade much like this one fourteen years ago, that it had been the last straw, the one which finally drove her over the edge. He had broken many of her bones during their years together, and she had let him live. Finally he had broken something she really needed, and she had taken his life.
She decided she did not have to tell Mr. Gaunt this.
He looked like the sort of man who might already know.
3
"Polly! Polly, she's coming out!"
Polly left the dressmaker's dummy where she had been slowly and carefully pinning up a hem, and hurried to the window. She and Rosalie stood side by side, watching as Nettie left Needful Things in a state which could only be described as heavily laden. Her purse was under one arm, her umbrella was under the other, and in her hands she held Polly's Tupperware cake container balanced atop a square white box.
"Maybe I better go help her," Rosalie said.
"No." Polly put out a hand and restrained her gently. "Better not. I think she'd only be embarrassed and fluttery."
They watched Nettie walk up the street. She no longer scuttled, as if before the jaws of a storm; now she seemed almost to drift.
No, Polly thought. No, that isn't right. It's more like ... floating.
Her mind suddenly made one of those odd connections which were almost like cross-references, and she burst out laughing.
Rosalie looked at her, eyebrows raised. "Share?"
"It's the look on her face," Polly said, watching Nettie cross Linden Street in slow, dreamy steps.
"What do you mean?"
"She looks like a woman who just got laid ... and had about three orgasms."
Rosalie turned pink, looked at Nettie once more, and then screamed with laughter. Polly joined in. The two of them held each other and rocked back and forth, laughing wildly.
"Gee," Alan Pangborn said from the front of the store. "Ladies laughing well before noon! It's too early for champagne, so what is it?"
"Four!" Rosalie said, giggling madly. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. "It looked more like four to me!"
Then they were off again, rocking back and forth in each other's arms, howling with laughter while Alan stood watching them with his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants, smiling quizzically.
4
Norris Ridgewick arrived at the Sheriff's Office in his street clothes about ten minutes before the noon whistle blew at the mill. He had the mid-shift, from twelve until nine p.m., right through the weekend, and that was just the way he liked it. Let somebody else clean up the messes on the highways and byways of Castle County after the bars closed at one o'clock; he could do it, had done it on many occasions, but he almost always puked his guts. He sometimes puked his guts even if the victims were up, walking around, and yelling that they didn't have to take any fucking breathalyzer test, they knew their Constipational rights. Norris just had that kind of a stomach. Sheila Brigham liked to tease him by saying he was like Deputy Andy on that TV show Twin Peaks, but Norris knew he wasn't. Deputy Andy cried when he saw dead people. Norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had almost puked on Homer Gamache that time when he had found Homer sprawled in a ditch out by Homeland Cemetery, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.
Norris glanced at the roster, saw that both Andy Clutterbuck and John LaPointe were out on patrol, then at the daywatch board. Nothing there for him, which was also just the way he liked it. To make his day complete--this end of it, at lea
A note pinned to the plastic dry-cleaning bag read, "Hey Barney--you owe me $5.25. Do not stiff me this time or you will be a sadder & wiser man when the sun goes down." It was signed Clut.
Norris's good mood was unbroken even by the note's salutation. Sheila Brigham was the only person in the Castle Rock Sheriff's Office who thought of Norris as a Twin Peaks kind of guy (Norris had an idea that she was the only person in the department--besides himself, that was --who even watched the show). The other deputies--John LaPointe, Seat Thomas, Andy Clutterbuck--called him Barney, after the Don Knotts character on the old Andy Griffith Show. This sometimes irritated him, but not today. Four days of mid-shift, then three days off. A whole week of silk laid out before him. Life could sometimes be grand.
He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and laid them on Clut's desk. "Hey, Clut, live a little," he jotted on the back of a report form, signed his name with a flourish, and left it by the money. Then he stripped the dry-cleaning bag off the uniform and took it into the men's room. He whistled as he changed clothes, then waggled his eyebrows approvingly as he stared at his reflection in the mirror. He was Squared Away, by God. One hundred per cent Squared Away. The evildoers of Castle Rock had damned well better be on the lookout today, or--
He caught movement behind him in the mirror, but before he could do more than begin to turn his head he had been grabbed, spun around, and slammed into the tiles beside the urinals. His head bonked the wall, his cap fell off, and then he was looking into the round, flushed face of Danforth Keeton.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing, Ridgewick?" he asked.
Norris had forgotten all about the ticket he had slipped under the windshield wiper of Keeton's Cadillac the night before. Now it all came back to him.
"Let go of me!" he said. He tried for a tone of indignation, but his voice came out in a worried squeak. He felt his cheeks growing hot. Whenever he was angry or scared--and right now he was both--he blushed like a girl.