Needful Things by Stephen King
PLAY ME.
Ace pulled off the note and pushed the PLAY button. The reels began to turn, and when he heard that voice, he jumped a little. Still, whose voice had he expected? Richard Nixon's?
"Hello, Ace," Mr. Gaunt's recorded voice said. "Welcome to Boston. Please remove the tarp from my car and load the crates. They contain rather special merchandise which I expect to need quite soon now. I'm afraid you'll have to put at least one crate in the back seat; the Tucker's trunk leaves something to be desired. Your own car will be quite safe here, and your ride back will be uneventful. And please remember this--the sooner you get back, the sooner you can begin investigating the locations on your map. Have a pleasant trip."
The message was followed by the empty hiss of tape and the low whine of the capstan drive.
Ace left the reels turning for almost a minute, nevertheless. This whole situation was weird ... and getting weirder all the time. Mr. Gaunt had been here during the afternoon--had to have been, because he had mentioned the map, and Ace hadn't laid eyes on either the map or Mr. Leland Gaunt until this morning. The old buzzard must have taken a plane down while he, Ace, was driving. But why? What the fuck did it all mean?
He hasn't been here, he thought. I don't care if it's impossible or not--he hasn't been here. Look at that goddam tape recorder, for instance. Nobody uses tape recorders like that anymore. And look at the dust on the reels. The note was dusty, too. This set-up has been waiting for you a long time. Maybe it's been sitting here and catching dust ever since Pangborn sent you to Shawshank.
Oh, but that was crazy.
That was just bullshit.
Nevertheless, there was a deep core-part of him that believed it was true. Mr. Gaunt hadn't been anywhere near Boston this afternoon. Mr. Gaunt had spent the afternoon in Castle Rock--Ace knew it--standing by his window, watching the passersby, perhaps even removing the CLOSED COLUMBUS DAY
sign every now and then and putting up
OPEN
in its place. If he saw the right person approaching, that was--the sort of person with whom a fellow like Mr. Gaunt might want to do a spot of business.
Just what was his business?
Ace wasn't sure he wanted to know. But he wanted to know what was in those crates. If he was going to transport them from here all the way back to Castle Rock, he had a goddam right to know.
He pushed the STOP button on the tape recorder and lifted it aside. He took a hammer from the tools on top of the work-table and the crowbar which leaned against the wall next to it. He returned to the crates and slid the crowbar's flat end under the wooden lid of the one on top. He levered it up. The nails let go with a thin shriek. The contents of the crate were covered with a heavy oilcloth square. He lifted it aside and simply gaped at what he saw beneath.
Blasting caps.
Dozens of blasting caps.
Maybe hundreds of blasting caps, each resting in its own cozy little nest of excelsior.
Jesus Christ, what's he planning to do? Start World War III?
Heart thumping heavily in his chest, Ace hammered the nails back down and lifted the crate of blasting caps aside. He opened the second crate, expecting to see neat rows of fat red sticks that looked like road-flares.
But it wasn't dynamite. It was guns.
There were maybe two dozen in all--high-powered automatic pistols. The smell of the deep grease in which they had been packed drifted up to him. He didn't know what kind they were--German, maybe--but he knew what they meant: twenty-to-life if he was caught with them in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth took an extremely dim view of guns, especially automatic weapons.
This case he set aside without putting the lid back on. He opened the third crate. It was full of ammo clips for the pistols.
Ace stepped back, rubbing his mouth nervously with the palm of his left hand.
Blasting caps.
Automatic handguns.
Ammunition.
This was merchandise?
"Not me," Ace said in a low voice, shaking his head. "Not this kid. Uh-uh, no way."
Mexico City was looking better and better. Maybe even Rio. Ace didn't know if Gaunt was building a better mousetrap or a better electric chair, but he did know he wanted no part of it, whatever it was. He was leaving, and he was leaving right now.
His eyes fixed on the crate of automatic pistols.
And I'm taking one of those babies with me, he thought. A little something for my trouble. Call it a souvenir.
He started toward the crate, and at that instant the reels of the tape recorder began to turn again, although none of the buttons had been depressed.
"Don't even think about it, Ace," the voice of Mr. Gaunt advised coldly, and Ace screamed. "You don't want to fuck with me. What I do to you if you even try will make what the Corson Brothers were planning look like a day in the country. You're my boy now. Stick with me and we'll have fun. Stick with me and you'll get back at everyone in Castle Rock who ever did the nasty to you ... and you'll leave a rich man. Go against me and you'll never stop screaming."
The tape recorder stopped.
Ace's bulging eyes followed its power cord to the plug. It lay on the floor, covered with a fine spill of dust.
Besides, there wasn't an outlet in sight.
4
Ace suddenly began to feel a little calmer, and this was not quite so odd as it might have seemed. There were two reasons for the steadying of his emotional barometer.
The first was that Ace was a kind of throwback. He would have been perfectly at home living in a cave and dragging his woman around by the hair when he wasn't busy throwing rocks at his enemies. He was the sort of man whose response is only completely predictable when he is confronted with superior strength and authority. Confrontations of this kind didn't happen often, but when they did, he bowed to the superior force almost at once. Although he did not know it, it was this characteristic which had kept him from simply running away from the Flying Corson Brothers in the first place. In men like Ace Merrill, the only urge stronger than the urge to dominate is the deep need to roll over and humbly expose the undefended neck when the real leader of the pack puts in an appearance.
The second reason was even simpler: he chose to believe he was dreaming. There was some part of him which knew this wasn't true, but the idea was still easier to believe than the evidence of his senses; he didn't even want to consider a world which might admit the presence of a Mr. Gaunt. It would be easier--safer--to just close down his thinking processes for a while and march along to the conclusion of this business. If he did that, he might eventually wake up to the world he had always known. God knew that world had its dangers, but at least he understood it.
He hammered the tops back onto the crate of pistols and the crate of ammo. Then he went over to the stored automobile and grasped the canvas tarpaulin, which was also covered with a mantle of dust. He pulled it off ... and for a moment he forgot everything else in wonder and delight.
It was a Tucker, all right, and it was beautiful.
The paint was canary yellow. The streamlined body gleamed with chrome along the sides and beneath the notched front bumper. A third headlight stared from the center of the hood, below a silver ornament that looked like the engine of a futuristic express train.
Ace walked slowly around it, trying to eat it up with his eyes.
There was a pair of chromed grilles on either side of the back deck; he had no idea what they were for. The fat Goodyear whitewalls were so clean they almost glowed under the hanging lights. Written in flowing chrome script across the back deck were the words "Tucker Talisman." Ace had never heard of such a model. He had thought the Torpedo was the only car Preston Tucker had ever turned out.
You have another problem, old buddy--there are no license plates on this thing. Are you going to try getting all the way back to Maine in a car that sticks out like a sore thumb, a car with no plates, a car loaded with guns and explosive devices?
Yes. He was. It was a bad idea,
He shook the keys out of the envelope, went around to the trunk, and hunted in vain for a keyhole. After a few moments he remembered the movie with Jeff Bridges and understood. Like the German VW Beetle and the Chevy Corvair, the Tucker's engine was back here. The trunk was up front.
Sure enough, he found the keyhole directly under that weird third headlight. He opened the trunk. It was indeed very cozy, and empty except for a single object. It was a small bottle of white dust with a spoon attached to the cap by a chain. A small piece of paper had been taped to the chain. Ace pulled it free and read the message which had been written there in teeny capital letters:
Ace followed orders.
5
Feeling much better with a little of Mr. Gaunt's incomparable blow lighting up his brain like the front of Henry Beaufort's Rock-Ola, Ace loaded the guns and the clips of ammo into the trunk. He put the crate of blasting caps into the back seat, pausing for just a moment to inhale deeply. The sedan had that incomparable new-car smell, nothing like it in the world (except maybe for pussy), and when he got behind the wheel, he saw that it was brand new: the odometer of Mr. Gaunt's Tucker Talisman was set at 00000.0.
Ace pushed the ignition key into the slot and turned it.
The Talisman started up with a low, throaty, delightful rumble. How many horses under the hood? He didn't know, but it felt like a whole herd of them. There had been lots of automotive books in prison, and Ace had read most of them. The Tucker Torpedo had been a flathead six, about three hundred and fifty cubic inches, a lot like the cars Mr. Ford had built between 1948 and 1952. It had had something like a hundred and fifty horses under the hood.
This one felt bigger. A lot bigger.
Ace felt an urge to get out, go around back, and see if he could worry the hood open ... but it was like thinking too much about that crazy name--Yog-whatever. Somehow it seemed like a bad idea. What seemed like a good idea was to get this thing back to Castle Rock just as fast as he could.
He started to get out of the car to use the door control, then honked the horn instead, just to see if anything would happen. Something did. The door trundled silently up on its rails.
There's a sound sensor around someplace for sure, he told himself, but he no longer believed it. He no longer even cared. He shifted into first and the Talisman throbbed out of the garage. He honked again as he started down the rutty path to the hole in the fence, and in the rearview mirror he saw the garage lights go out and the door start to descend. He also caught a glimpse of his Challenger, standing with its nose to the wall and the crumpled tarp on the floor beside it. He had an odd feeling that he was never going to see it again. Ace found he didn't care about that, either.
6
The Talisman not only ran like a dream, it seemed to know its own way back to Storrow Drive and the turnpike north. Every now and then the turnblinkers went on by themselves. When this happened, Ace simply made the next turn. In no time at all the creepy little Cambridge slum where he had found the Tucker was behind him, and the shape of the Tobin Bridge, more familiarly known as the Mystic River Bridge, was looming in front of him, a black gantry against the darkening sky.
Ace pulled the light-switch, and a sharply defined fan of radiance at once sprang out before him. When he turned the wheel, the fan of light turned with it. That center headlight was a hell of a rig. No wonder they drove the poor bastard who thought this car up out of business, Ace thought.
He was about thirty miles north of Boston when he noticed the needle of the fuel gauge was sitting on the peg beyond E. He pulled off at the nearest exit and cruised Mr. Gaunt's ride to a stop at the pumps of a Mobil station which stood at the ramp's foot. The pump jockey pushed his cap back on his head with one greasy thumb and walked around the car admiringly. "Nice car!" he said. "Where'd you get it?"
Without thinking, Ace said, "The Plains of Leng. Yog-Sothoth Vintage Motors."
"Huh?"
"Just fill it up, son--this isn't Twenty Questions."
"Oh!" the pump jockey said, taking a second look at Ace and becoming obsequious at once. "Sure! You bet!"
And he tried, but the pump clicked off after running just fourteen cents into the tank. The pump jockey tried to squeeze more in by running the pump manually, but the gas only slopped out, running down the Talisman's gleaming yellow flank and dripping onto the tarmac.
"I guess it doesn't need gas," the jockey said timidly.
"Guess not."
"Maybe your fuel gauge is bust--"
"Wipe that gas off the side of my car. You want the paint to blister? What's the matter with you?"
The kid sprang to do it, and Ace went into the bathroom to help his nose a little. When he came out, the pump jockey was standing at a respectful distance from the Talisman, twisting his rag nervously in both hands.
He's scared, Ace thought. Scared of what? Me?
No; the kid in the Mobil coverall barely glanced in Ace's direction. It was the Tucker that kept drawing his gaze.
He tried to touch it, Ace thought.
The revelation--and that was what it was, exactly what it was--brought a grim little smile to the corners of his mouth.
He tried to touch it and something happened. What it was don't really matter. It taught him that he can look but he better not touch, and that's all that does matter.
"Won't be no charge," the pump jockey said.
"You got that right." Ace slid behind the wheel and got rolling in a hurry. He had a brand-new idea about the Talisman. In a way it was a scary idea, but in another way it was a really great idea. He thought that maybe the gas gauge always read empty ... and that the tank was always full.
7
The toll-gates for passenger cars in New Hampshire are the automated kind; you throw a buck's worth of change (No Pennies Please) into the basket, the red light turns green, and you go. Except when Ace rolled the Tucker Talisman up to the basket jutting out from the post, the light turned green on its own and the little sign shone out: TOLL PAID, THANK U.
"Betcha fur," Ace muttered, and drove on toward Maine.
By the time he left Portland behind, he had the Talisman cruising along at just over eighty miles an hour, and there was plenty left under the hood. Just past the Falmouth exit, he topped a rise and saw a State Police cruiser lurking beside the highway. The distinctive torpedo-shape of a radar gun jutted from the driver's window.
Uh-oh, Ace thought. He got me. Dead-bang. Jesus Christ, why was I speeding anyway, with all the shit I'm carrying?
But he knew why, and it wasn't the coke he had snorted. Maybe on another occasion, but not this time. It was the Talisman. It wanted to go fast. He would look at the speedometer, ease his foot off the go-pedal a little ... and five minutes later he would realize he had it three quarters of the way to the floor again.
He waited for the cruiser to come alive in a blaze of pulsing blue lights and rip out after him, but it didn't happen. Ace blipped past at eighty, and the State Bear never made a move.
Hell, he must have been cooping.
But Ace knew better. When you saw a radar gun poking out of the window, you knew the guy inside was wide awake and hot to trot. No, what had happened was this: the State cop hadn't been able to see the Talisman. It sounded crazy, but it felt exactly right. The big yellow car with its three headlights screaming out of the front was invisible to both high-tech hardware and the cops that used it.
Grinning, Ace walked Mr. Gaunt's Tucker Talisman up to a hundred and ten. He arrived back in The Rock at quarter past eight, with almost four hours to spare.
8
Mr. Gaunt emerged from his shop and stood beneath the canopy to watch Ace baby the Talisman into one of the three slant parking spaces in front of Needful Things.
"You made good time, Ace."
"Yeah. This is some car."
"Bet your fur," Mr
"Yeah. Mr. Gaunt, I got some idea of just how special this car of yours is on the way back, but I think you still might consider getting some license plates for it, and maybe an inspection stick--"
"They are not necessary," Mr. Gaunt said indifferently. "Park it in the alley behind the shop, Ace, if you please. I'll take care of it later."
"How? Where?" Ace found himself suddenly reluctant to turn the car over to Mr. Gaunt. It was not just that he'd left his own car in Boston and needed wheels for his night's work; the Talisman made every other car he had ever driven, including the Challenger, seem like street-trash.
"That," said Mr. Gaunt, "is my business." He looked at Ace imperturbably. "You'll find that things go more smoothly for you, Ace, if you look at working for me the way you would look at serving in the Army. There are three ways of doing things for you now--the right way, the wrong way, and Mr. Gaunt's way. If you always opt for the third choice, trouble will never find you. Do you understand me?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I do."
"That's fine. Now drive around to the back door."
Ace piloted the yellow car around the corner and drove slowly up the narrow alley which ran behind the business buildings on the west side of Main Street. The rear door of Needful Things was open. Mr. Gaunt stood in a slanted oblong of yellow light, waiting. He made no effort to help as Ace carried the crates into the shop's back room, puffing with the effort. He did not know it, but a good many customers would have been surprised if they had seen that room. They had heard Mr. Gaunt back there behind the hanging velvet drape which divided the shop from the storage area, shifting goods, moving boxes around ... but there was nothing at all in the room until Ace stacked the crates in one corner at Mr. Gaunt's direction.
Yes--there was one thing. On the far side of the room, a brown Norway rat was lying beneath the sprung arm of a large Victory rat-trap. Its neck was broken, its front teeth exposed in a dead snarl.