Needful Things

by Stephen King

  "Hah!" Buster grunted. "Didn't expect that, did you? Didn't expect that at all, you persecuting son of a bitch, did you?"

  He wriggled the rest of the way into his car. There was just enough chain. His shoulder-joint creaked alarmingly and then rotated enough in its socket to allow him to wriggle under his own arm and scoot his ass back along the seat. Now he was sitting behind the wheel with his cuffed arm out the window. He started the car.

  Scott Garson sat up in time to see the Cadillac bearing down on him. Its grille seemed to leer at him, a vast chrome mountain which was going to crush him.

  He rolled frantically to the left, avoiding death by less than a second. One of the Cadillac's large front tires rolled over his right hand, squashing it pretty efficiently. Then the rear tire rolled over it, finishing the job. Garson lay on his back, looking at his grotesquely mashed fingers, which were now roughly the size of putty-knives, and began to scream up into the hot blue sky.

  31

  "TAMMMEEEEE FAYYYYE!"

  This shriek hauled Frank Jewett out of his deepening doze. He had absolutely no idea where he was in those first confused seconds--only that it was some tight, close place. An unpleasant place. There was something in his hand, too ... what was it?

  He raised his right hand and almost poked out his own eye with the steak-knife.

  "Oooooohhhh, noooooooh! TAMMEEEEEEE FAYYYYE!"

  It came back to him all at once. He was behind the couch of his good old "friend," George T. Nelson, and that was George T. Nelson himself, in the flesh, noisily mourning his dead parakeet. Along with this realization, everything else returned to Frank: the magazines scattered all over the office, the blackmail note, the possible (no, probable--the more he thought about it, the more probable it seemed) ruin of his career and his life.

  Now, incredibly, he could hear George T. Nelson sobbing. Sobbing over a goddam flying shithouse. Well, Frank thought, I'm going to put you out of your misery, George. Who knows--maybe you'll even wind up in bird heaven.

  The sobs were approaching the sofa. Better and better. He would jump up--surprise, George!--and the bastard would be dead before he had any idea of what was up. Frank was on the verge of making his spring when George T. Nelson, still sobbing as if his heart would break, seat-dropped onto his sofa. He was a heavy man, and his weight drove the sofa back smartly toward the wall. He did not hear the surprised, breathless "Oooof!" from behind him; his own sobs covered it. He fumbled for the telephone, dialed through a shimmer of tears and got (almost miraculously) Fred Rubin on the first ring.

  "Fred!" he cried. "Fred, something terrible has happened! Maybe it's still happening! Oh Jesus, Fred! Oh Jesus!"

  Below and behind him, Frank Jewett was struggling for breath. Edgar Allan Poe stories he'd read as a kid, stories about being buried alive, raced through his head. His face was slowly turning the color of old brick. The heavy wooden leg which had been forced against his chest when George T. Nelson collapsed onto the sofa felt like a bar of lead. The back of the sofa lay against his shoulder and the side of his face.

  Above him, George T. Nelson was spilling a garbled description of what he'd found when he finally got home into Fred Rubin's ear. At last he paused for a moment and then cried out, "I don't care if I shouldn't be talking about it on the phone--HOW CAN I CARE WHEN HE KILLED TAMMY FAYE? THE BASTARD KILLED TAMMY FAYE! Who could have done it, Fred? Who? You have to help me!"

  Another pause as George T. Nelson listened, and Frank realized with growing panic that he was soon going to pass out. He suddenly understood what he had to do--use the Llama automatic to shoot up through the sofa. He might not kill George T. Nelson, he might not even hit George T. Nelson, but he could sure as hell get George T. Nelson's attention, and once he did that he thought the odds were good that George T. Nelson would get his fat ass off this sofa before Frank died down here with his nose squashed against the baseboard heating unit.

  Frank opened the hand holding the steak-knife and tried to reach for the pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants. Dreamlike horror washed through him as he realized he couldn't get it--his fingers were opening and closing two full inches above the gun's ivory-inlaid handle. He tried with all his remaining strength to get the hand down lower, but his pinned shoulder would not move at all; the big sofa--and George T. Nelson's considerable weight--held it firmly against the wall. It might have been nailed there.

  Black roses--harbingers of approaching asphyxiation--began to bloom before Frank's bulging eyes.

  As from some impossible distance, he heard his old "friend" screaming at Fred Rubin, who undoubtedly had been George T. Nelson's partner in the cocaine deal. "What are you talking about? I call to tell you I've been violated and you tell me to go see the new guy downstreet? I don't need knick-knacks, Fred, I need--"

  He broke off, got up, and paced across the room. With what was literally the last of his strength, Frank managed to push the sofa a few inches away from the wall. It wasn't much, but he was able to take small sips of incredibly wonderful air.

  "He sells what?" George T. Nelson shouted. "Well, Jesus! Jesus H. Christ! Why didn't you say so in the first place?"

  Silence again. Frank lay behind the sofa like a beached whale, sipping air and hoping his monstrously pounding head would not explode. In a moment he would arise and blow his old "friend" George T. Nelson's oysters off. In a moment. When he got his breath back. And when the big black flowers currently filling his sight shrank back into nothing. In a moment. Two at the most.

  "Okay," George T. Nelson said. "I'll go see him. I doubt if he's the miracle-worker you think he is, but any goddam port in a storm, right? I have to tell you something, though--I don't give much of a shit if he's dealing or not. I'm going to find the son of a bitch who did this--that's the first goddam order of business--and I'm going to nail him to the nearest wall. Have you got that?"

  I got it, Frank thought, but just who nails who to that fabled wall still remains to be seen, my dear old party-buddy.

  "Yes, I did get the name!" George T. Nelson screamed into the phone. "Gaunt, Gaunt, fucking Gaunt!"

  He slammed the phone down, then must have thrown it across the room--Frank heard the shatter of breaking glass. Seconds later, George T. Neison uttered a final oath and stormed out of the house. The engine of his Iroc-Z raved to life. Frank heard him backing down the driveway as he himself slowly pushed the sofa away from the wall. Rubber screamed against pavement outside and then Frank's old "friend" George T. Nelson was gone.

  Two minutes later, a pair of hands rose into view and clutched the back of the oatmeal-colored sofa. A moment after that, the face of Frank M. Jewett--pale and crazed, the rimless Mr. Weatherbee glasses sitting askew on his small pug nose and one lens cracked--appeared between the hands. The sofa-back had left a red, stippled pattern on his right cheek. A few dust-bunnies danced in his thinning hair.

  Slowly, like a bloated corpse rising from the bed of a river until it floats just below the surface, the grin reappeared on Frank's face. He had missed his old "friend" George T. Nelson this time, but George T. Nelson had no plans to leave town. His phone conversation had made that quite clear. Frank would find him before the day was over. In a town the size of Castle Rock, how could he miss?

  32

  Sean Rusk stood in the kitchen doorway of his house, looking anxiously out at the garage. Five minutes before, his older brother had gone out there--Sean had been looking out of his bedroom window and had just happened to see him. Brian had been holding something in one hand. The distance had been too great for Sean to see what it was, but he didn't need to see. He knew. It was the new baseball card, the one Brian kept creeping upstairs to look at. Brian didn't know Sean knew about that card, but Sean did. He even knew who was on it, because he'd gotten home much earlier from school today than Brian, and he had sneaked into Brian's room to look at it. He didn't have the slightest idea why Brian cared about it so much; it was old, dirty, dog-eared, and faded. Also, the player was somebody Sean had neve
r heard of--a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Sammy Koberg, lifetime record one win, three losses. The guy had never even spent a whole year in the majors. Why would Brian care about a worthless card like that?

  Sean didn't know. He only knew two things for sure: Brian did care, and the way Brian had been acting for the last week or so was scary. It was like those TV ads you saw about kids on drugs. But Brian wouldn't use drugs ... would he?

  Something about Brian's face when he went out to the garage had scared Sean so badly he had gone to tell his mother. He wasn't sure exactly what to say, and it turned out not to matter because he didn't get a chance to say anything. She was mooning around in the bedroom, wearing her bathrobe and those stupid sunglasses from the new store downtown.

  "Mom, Brian's--" he began, and that was as far as he got.

  "Go away, Sean. Mommy's busy right now."

  "But Mom--"

  "Go away, I said!"

  And before he had a chance to go on his own, he'd found himself hustled unceremoniously out of the bedroom. Her bathrobe fell open as she pushed him, and before he could look away, he saw that she was wearing nothing beneath it, not even a nightgown.

  She had slammed the door behind him. And locked it.

  Now he stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting anxiously for Brian to come back out of the garage ... but Brian didn't.

  His unease had grown in some stealthy way until it was barely controlled terror. Sean went out the kitchen door, trotted through the breezeway, and entered the garage.

  It was dark and oily-smelling and explosively hot inside. For a moment he didn't see his brother in the shadows and thought he must have gone out through the back door into the yard. Then his eyes adjusted, and he uttered a small, whimpery gasp.

  Brian was sitting against the rear wall, next to the Lawnboy. He had gotten Daddy's rifle. The butt was propped on the floor. The muzzle was pointed at his own face. Brian was supporting the barrel with one hand while the other clutched the dirty old baseball card which had somehow gained such a hold over his life this last week.

  "Brian!" Sean cried. "What are you doing?"

  "Don't come any closer, Sean, you'll get the mess on you."

  "Brian, don't!" Sean cried, beginning to weep. "Don't be such a wussy! You're ... you're scaring me!"

  "I want you to promise me something," Brian said. He had taken off his socks and sneakers, and now he wriggled one of his big toes inside the Remington's trigger-guard.

  Sean felt his crotch grow wet and warm. He had never been so scared in his life. "Brian, please! Pleeease!"

  "I want you to promise me you'll never go to the new store," Brian said. "Do you hear me?"

  Sean took a step toward his brother. Brian's toe tightened on the trigger of the rifle.

  "No!" Sean screamed, drawing back at once. "I mean yes! Yes!"

  Brian let the barrel drop a little when he saw his brother retreat. His toe relaxed a bit. "Promise me."

  "Yes! Anything you want! Only don't do that! Don't ... don't tease me anymore, Bri! Let's go in and watch The Transformers! No ... you pick! Anything you want! Even Wapner! We can watch Wapner if you want to! All week! All month! I'll watch with you! Only stop scaring me, Brian, please stop scaring me!"

  Brian Rusk might not have heard. His eyes seemed to float in his distant, serene face.

  "Never go there," he said. "Needful Things is a poison place, and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he's really not a man, Sean. He's not a man at all. Swear to me you'll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells."

  "I swear! I swear!" Sean babbled. "I swear on Mommy's name!"

  "No," Brian said, "you can't do that, because he got her, too. Swear on your own name, Sean. Swear it on your very own name."

  "I do!" Sean cried out in the hot, dim garage. He held his hands out imploringly to his brother. "I really do, I swear on my very own name! Now please put the gun down, Bri--"

  "I love you, baby brother." He looked down at the baseball card for a moment. "Sandy Koufax sucks," Brian Rusk remarked, and pulled the trigger with his toe.

  Sean's drilling shriek of horror rose over the blast, which was flat and loud in the hot dark garage.

  33

  Leland Gaunt stood at his shop window, looking out on Main Street and smiling gently. The sound of the shot from up on Ford Street was faint, but his ears were sharp and he heard it.

  His smile broadened a little.

  He took down the sign in the window, the one which said he was open by appointment only, and put up a new one. This one read

  CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  "We're having fun now," Leland Gaunt said to no one at all. "Yessirree."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1

  Polly Chalmers knew nothing of these things.

  While Castle Rock was bearing the first real fruits of Mr. Gaunt's labors, she was out at the end of Town Road #3, at the old Camber place. She had gone there as soon as she had finished her conversation with Alan.

  Finished it? she thought. Oh my dear, that's much too civilized. After you hung up on him--isn't that what you mean?

  All right, she agreed. After I hung up on him. But he went behind my back. And when I called him on it, he got all flustered and then lied about it. He lied about it. I happen to think that behavior like that deserves an uncivilized response.

  Something stirred uneasily in her at this, something which might have spoken if she had given it time and room, but she gave it neither. She wanted no dissenting voices; did not, in fact, want to think about her last conversation with Alan Pangborn at all. She just wanted to take care of her business out here at the end of Town Road #3 and then go back home. Once she was there, she intended to take a cool bath and then go to bed for twelve or sixteen hours.

  That deep voice managed just five words: But, Polly ... have you thought--

  No. She hadn't. She supposed she would have to think in time, but now was too soon. When the thinking began, the hurting would begin, too. For now she only wanted to take care of business ... and not think at all.

  The Camber place was spooky ... reputed by some to be haunted. Not so many years ago, two people--a small boy and Sheriff George Bannerman--had died in the dooryard of this house. Two others, Gary Pervier and Joe Camber himself, had died just down the hill. Polly parked her car over the place where a woman named Donna Trenton had once made the fatal mistake of parking her Ford Pinto, and got out. The azka swung back and forth between her breasts as she did.

  She looked around uneasily for a moment at the sagging porch, the paintless walls overrun by climbing ivy, the windows which were mostly broken and stared blindly back at her. Crickets sang their stupid songs in the grass, and the hot sun beat down as it had on those terrible days when Donna Trenton had fought for her life here, and for the life of her son.

  What am I doing here? Polly thought. What in God's name am I doing here?

  But she knew, and it had nothing to do with Alan Pangborn or Kelton or the San Francisco Department of Child Welfare. This little field-trip had nothing to do with love. It had to do with pain. That was all ... but that was enough.

  There was something inside the small silver charm. Something that was alive. If she did not live up to her side of the bargain she had made with Leland Gaunt, it would die. She didn't know if she could stand to be tumbled back down into the horrible, grinding pain to which she had awakened on Sunday morning. If she had to face a lifetime of such pain, she thought she would kill herself.

  "And it's not Alan," she whispered as she walked toward the barn with its gaping doorway and its ominous swaybacked roof. "He said he wouldn't raise a hand against him."

  Why do you even care? that worrisome voice whispered.

  She cared because she didn't want to hurt Alan. She was angry at him, yes--furious, in fact--but that didn't mean she had to stoop to his level, that she had to treat him as shabbily he had treated her.

  But, Polly ... have you thought--

&nbs
p; No. No!

  She was going to play a trick on Ace Merrill, and she didn't care about Ace at all--had never even met him, only knew him by reputation. The trick was on Ace, but...

  But Alan, who had sent Ace Merrill away to Shawshank, came into it someplace. Her heart told her so.

  And could she back out of this? Could she, even if she wanted to? Now it was Kelton, as well. Mr. Gaunt hadn't exactly told her that the news of what had happened to her son would end up all over town unless she did what he told her to do ... but he had hinted as much. She couldn't bear for that to happen.

  Is a woman not entitled to her pride? When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?

  Yes. And yes. And yes.

  Mr. Gaunt had told her she'd find the only tool she would need in the barn; now Polly began to walk slowly in that direction.

  Go where ye list, but go there alive, Trisha, Aunt Evvie had told her. Don't be no ghost.

  But now, stepping into the Camber barn through doors which hung gaping and frozen on their rusty tracks, she felt like a ghost. She had never felt more like a ghost in her life. The azka moved between her breasts ... on its own now. Something inside. Something alive. She didn't like it, but she liked the idea of what would happen if that thing died even less.

  She would do what Mr. Gaunt had told her to do, at least this once, cut all her ties with Alan Pangborn (it had been a mistake to ever begin with him, she saw that now, saw it clearly), and keep her past her own. Why not?

  After all, it was such a little thing.

  2

  The shovel was exactly where he had told her it would be, leaning against one wall in a dusty shaft of sunlight. She took hold of its smooth, worn handle.

  Suddenly she seemed to hear a low, purring growl from the deep shadows of the barn, as if the rabid Saint Bernard which had killed Big George Bannerman and caused the death of Tad Trenton were still here, back from the dead and meaner than ever. Gooseflesh danced up her arms and Polly left the barn in a hurry. The dooryard was not exactly cheery--not with that empty house glaring sullenly at her--but it was better than the barn.