"What did he look like?" Dave Corson asked.
"He's a tall guy--not as tall as him"--Ace cocked a thumb at the driver, who was wearing a pair of Walkman earphones and rocking back and forth to a beat only he could hear--"but tall. He's a Canuck. Talks like dis, him. Got a little gold earring."
"That's ole Daffy Duck," Mike Corson agreed.
"Tell you the truth, I'm amazed nobody's whacked the guy yet," Dave Corson said. He looked at his brother, Mike, and they shook their heads at each other in perfectly shared wonder.
"I thought he was okay," Ace said. "Ducky always used to be okay."
"But you took some time off, dintcha?" Mike Corson asked.
"Little vacation at the Crossbar Hotel," Dave Corson said.
"You must have been inside when the Duckman discovered free-base," Mike said. "That was when his act started goin downhill fast."
"Ducky has a little trick he likes to pull these days," Dave said. "Do you know what bait-and-switch is, Ace?"
Ace thought about it. Then he shook his head.
"Yes, you do," Dave said. "Because that's the reason your ass is in a crack. Ducky showed you a lot of Baggies filled with white powder. One was full of good coke. The rest were full of shit. Like you, Ace."
"We tested!" Ace said. "I picked a bag at random, and we tested it!"
Mike and Dave looked at each other with dark drollery.
"They tested," Dave Corson said.
"He picked a bag at random," Mike Corson added.
They rolled their eyes upward and looked at each other in the mirror on the ceiling.
"Well?" Ace said, looking from one to the other. He was glad they knew who Ducky was, he was also glad they believed he hadn't meant to cheat them, but he was distressed just the same. They were treating him like a chump, and Ace Merrill was nobody's chump.
"Well what?" Mike Corson asked. "If you didn't think you picked the test bag yourself, the deal wouldn't go down, would it? Ducky is like a magician doing the same raggedy-ass card trick over and over again. 'Pick a card, any card.' You ever hear that one, Ace-Hole?"
Guns or no guns, Ace bridled. "Don't you call me that."
"We'll call you anything we want," Dave said. "You owe us eighty-five large, Ace, and what we've got for collateral on that money so far is a shitload of Arm & Hammer baking soda worth about a buck-fifty. We'll call you Hubert J. Motherfucker if we want to."
He and his brother looked at each other. Wordless communication passed between them. Dave got up and tapped Too-Tall Timmy on the shoulder. He gave Too-Tall his gun. Then Dave and Mike left the van and stood close together by a drift of sumac at the edge of some farmer's field, talking earnestly. Ace didn't know what words they were saying, but he knew perfectly well what was going on. They were deciding what to do with him.
He sat on the edge of the mud-bed, sweating like a pig, waiting for them to come back in. Too-Tall Timmy sprawled in the upholstered captain's chair Mike Corson had vacated, holding the H & K on Ace and nodding his head back and forth. Very faintly, Ace could hear the voices of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell coming from the earphones. Marvin and Tammi, who were both the late great these days, were singing "My Mistake."
Mike and Dave came back in.
"We're going to give you three months to make good," Mike said. Ace felt himself go limp with relief. "Right now we want our money more than we want to rip your skin off. There's something else, too."
"We want to whack Ducky Morin," Dave said. "His shit has gone on long enough."
"Guy's giving us all a bad name," Mike said.
"We think you can find him," Dave said. "We think he'll figure once an Ace-Hole, always an Ace-Hole."
"You got any comment on that, Ace-Hole?" Mike asked him.
Ace had no comment on that. He was happy just knowing that he would be seeing another weekend.
"November first is the deadline," Dave said. "You bring us our money by November first and then we all go after Ducky. If you don't, we're going to see how many pieces of you we can cut off before you finally give up and die."
8
When the balloon went up, Ace had been holding about a dozen assorted heavy-caliber weapons of both the automatic and semi-automatic varieties. He spent most of his grace period trying to turn these weapons into cash. Once he did that, he could turn cash back into coke. You couldn't have a better asset than cocaine when you needed to turn some big bucks in a hurry.
But the market for guns was temporarily in the horse latitudes. He sold half his stock--none of the big guns--and that was it. During the second week in September he had met a promising prospect at the Piece of Work Pub in Lewiston. The prospect had hinted in every way it was possible to hint that he would like to buy at least six and perhaps as many as ten automatic weapons, if the name of a reliable ammunition dealer went with the shooting irons. Ace could do that; the Flying Corson Brothers were the most reliable ammo dealers he knew.
Ace went into the grimy bathroom to do a couple of lines before hammering the deal home. He was suffused with the happy, relieved glow which has bedevilled a number of American Presidents; he believed he saw light at the end of the tunnel.
He laid the small mirror he carried in his shirt pocket on the toilet tank and was spooning coke onto it when a voice spoke from the urinal nearest the stall Ace was in. Ace never found out who the voice belonged to; he only knew that its owner might well have saved him fifteen years in a Federal penitentiary.
"Man you be talking to wearin a wire," the voice from the urinal said, and when Ace left the bathroom he went out the back door.
9
Following that near miss (it never occurred to him that his unseen informant might just have been amusing himself), an odd kind of paralysis settled over Ace. He became afraid to do anything but buy a little coke now and then for his own personal use. He had never experienced such a sensation of dead stop before. He hated it, but didn't know what to do about it. The first thing he did every day was look at the calendar. November seemed to be rushing toward him.
Then, this morning, he had awakened before dawn with a thought blazing in his mind like strange blue light: he had to go home. He had to go back to Castle Rock. That was where the answer was. Going home felt right ... but even if it turned out to be wrong, the change of scenery might break the strange vapor-lock in his head.
In Mechanic Falls he was just John Merrill, an ex-con who lived in a shack with plastic on the windows and cardboard on the door. In Castle Rock he had always been Ace Merrill, the ogre who strode through the nightmares of a whole generation of little kids. In Mechanic Falls he was poor-white back-road trash, a guy who had a custom Dodge but no garage to put it in. In Castle Rock he had been, at least for a little while, something like a king.
So he had come back, and here he was, and what now?
Ace didn't know. The town looked smaller, grimier, and emptier than he remembered. He supposed Pangborn was around someplace, and pretty soon old Bill Fullerton would get him on the honker and tell him who was back in town. Then Pangborn would find him and ask him what he thought he was doing here. He would ask if Ace had a job. He didn't, and he couldn't even claim he had come back to visit his unc, because Pop had been in his junkshop when the place burned down. Okay then, Ace, Pangborn would say, why don't you just jump back into your street machine and cruise on out of here?
And what was he going to say to that?
Ace didn't know--he only knew that the flash of dark-blue light with which he had awakened was still glimmering somewhere inside him.
The lot where the Emporium Galorium had stood was still vacant, he saw. Nothing there but weeds, a few charred board-ends, and some road-litter. Broken glass twinkled back the sun in eye-watering shards of hot light. There was nothing there to look at, but Ace wanted to look, anyway. He started across the street. He had almost reached the far side when the green awning two store-fronts up caught his eye.
NEEDFUL THINGS,
the side of the awn
ing read. Now what kind of name for a store was that? Ace walked up the street to see. He could look at the vacant lot where his uncle's tourist-trap had stood later on; he didn't think anyone was going to move it.
The first thing to catch his eye was the
HELP WANTED
sign. He paid it little attention. He didn't know what he had come back to Castle Rock for, but a stockboy job wasn't it.
There were a number of rather classy-looking items in the window--the sort of stuff he would have taken away if he were doing a little nightwork in some rich guy's house. A chess set with carved jungle animals for pieces. A necklace of black pearls--it looked valuable to Ace, but he supposed the pearls were probably artificial. Surely no one in this dipshit burg could afford a string of genuine black pearls. Good job, though; they looked real enough to him. And--
Ace looked at the book behind the pearls with narrowed eyes. It had been set up on its spine so someone looking in the window could easily see the cover, which depicted the silhouettes of two men standing on a ridge at night. One had a pick, the other a shovel. They appeared to be digging a hole. The title of the book was Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. The author's name was printed below the picture in small white letters.
It was Reginald Merrill.
Ace went to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. The bell overhead jingled. Ace Merrill entered Needful Things.
10
"No," Ace said, looking at the book Mr. Gaunt had taken from the window display and put into his hands. "This isn't the one I want. You must have gotten the wrong one."
"It's the only book in the show window, I assure you," Mr. Gaunt said in a mildly puzzled voice. "You can look for yourself if you don't believe me."
For a moment Ace did almost that, and then he let out an exasperated little sigh. "No, that's okay," he said.
The book the shopkeeper had handed him was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. What had happened was clear enough--he'd had Pop on his mind, and he'd made a mistake. The real mistake, though, had been coming back to Castle Rock in the first place. Why in the fuck had he done it?
"Listen, this is a very interesting place you've got here, but I ought to get a move on. I'll see you another time, Mr.--"
"Gaunt," the shopkeeper said, putting out his hand. "Leland Gaunt."
Ace put his own hand out and it was swallowed up. A great, galvanizing power seemed to rush through him at the moment of contact. His mind was filled with that dark-blue light again: a huge, sheeting flare of it this time.
He took his hand back, dazed and weak-kneed.
"What was that?" he whispered.
"I believe they call it 'an attention-getter,' " Mr. Gaunt said. He spoke with quiet composure. "You'll want to pay attention to me, Mr. Merrill."
"How did you know my name? I didn't tell you my name."
"Oh, I know who you are," Mr. Gaunt said with a little laugh. "I've been expecting you."
"How could you be expecting me? I didn't even know I was coming until I got in the damn car."
"Excuse me for a moment, please."
Gaunt stepped back toward the window, bent, and picked up a sign which was leaning against the wall. Then he leaned into the window, removed HELP WANTED
and put up CLOSED COLUMBUS DAY
in its place.
"Why'd you do that?" Ace felt like a man who has stumbled into a wire fence with a moderate electric charge running through it.
"It's customary for shopkeepers to remove help-wanted signs when they have filled the vacant position," Mr. Gaunt said, a little severely. "My business in Castle Rock has grown at a very satisfying rate, and I now find I need a strong back and an extra pair of hands. I tire so easily these days."
"Hey, I don't--"
"I also need a driver," Mr. Gaunt said. "Driving is, I believe, your main skill. Your first job, Ace, will be to drive to Boston. I have an automobile parked in a garage there. It will amuse you--it's a Tucker."
"A Tucker?" For a moment Ace forgot that he hadn't come to town to take a stockboy's job ... or a chauffeur's either, for that matter. "You mean like in that movie?"
"Not exactly," Mr. Gaunt said. He walked behind the counter where his old-fashioned cash register stood, produced a key, and unlocked the drawer beneath. He took out two small envelopes. One of them he laid on the counter. The other he held out to Ace. "It's been modified in some ways. Here. The keys."
"Hey, now, wait a minute! I told you--"
Mr. Gaunt's eyes were some strange color Ace could not quite pick up, but when they first darkened and then blazed out at him, Ace felt his knees grow watery again.
"You're in a jam, Ace, but if you don't stop behaving like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand, I believe I am going to lose interest in helping you. Shop assistants are a dime a dozen. I know, believe me. I've hired hundreds of them over the years. Perhaps thousands. So stop fucking around and take the keys."
Ace took the little envelope. As the tips of his fingers touched the tips of Mr. Gaunt's, that dark, sheeting fire filled his head once more. He moaned.
"You'll drive your car to the address I give you," Mr. Gaunt said, "and park it in the space where mine is now stored. I'll expect you back by midnight at the latest. I think it will actually be a good deal earlier than that.
"My car is much faster than it looks."
He grinned, revealing all those teeth.
Ace tried again. "Listen, Mr.--"
"Gaunt."
Ace nodded, his head bobbing up and down like the head of a marionette controlled by a novice puppet-master. "Under other circumstances, I'd take you up on it. You're ... interesting." It wasn't the word he wanted, but it was the best one he could wrap his tongue around for the time being. "But you were right--I am in a jackpot, and if I don't find a large chunk of cash in the next two weeks--"
"Well, what about the book?" Mr. Gaunt asked. His tone was both amused and reproving. "Isn't that why you came in?"
"It isn't what I--"
He discovered he was still holding it in his hand, and looked down at it again. The picture was the same, but the title had changed back to what he had seen in the show window: Lost and Buried Treasures of New England, by Reginald Merrill.
"What is this?" he asked thickly. But suddenly he knew. He wasn't in Castle Rock at all; he was at home in Mechanic Falls, lying in his own dirty bed, dreaming all this.
"It looks like a book to me," Mr. Gaunt said. "And wasn't your late uncle's name Reginald Merrill? What a coincidence."
"My uncle never wrote anything but receipts and IOUs in his whole life," Ace said in that same thick, sleepy voice. He looked up at Gaunt again, and found he could not pull his eyes away. Gaunt's eyes kept changing color. Blue ... gray ... hazel ... brown ... black.
"Well," Mr. Gaunt admitted, "perhaps the name on the book is a pseudonym. Perhaps I wrote that particular tome myself."
"You?"
Mr. Gaunt steepled his fingers under his chin. "Perhaps it isn't even a book at all. Perhaps all the really special things I sell aren't what they appear to be. Perhaps they are actually gray things with only one remarkable property--the ability to take the shapes of those things which haunt the dreams of men and women." He paused, then added thoughtfully: "Perhaps they are dreams themselves."
"I don't get any of this."
Mr. Gaunt smiled. "I know. It doesn't matter. If your uncle had written a book, Ace, mightn't it have been about buried treasure? Wouldn't you say that treasure--whether buried in the ground or in the pockets of his fellow men--was a subject which greatly interested him?"
"He liked money, all right," Ace said grimly.
"Well, what happened to it?" Mr. Gaunt cried. "Did he leave any of it to you? Surely he did; are you not his only surviving relative?"
"He didn't leave me a red fucking cent!" Ace yelled back furiously. "Everyone in town said that old bastard had the first dime he ever made, but there was less than four thousand dollars in his bank ac
counts when he died. That went to bury him and clean up that mess he left downstreet. And when they opened his safe deposit box, do you know what they found?"
"Yes," Mr. Gaunt said, and although his mouth was serious--even sympathetic--his eyes were laughing. "Trading stamps. Six books of Plaid Stamps and fourteen of Gold Bond Stamps."
"That's right!" Ace said. He looked balefully down at Lost and Buried Treasures of New England. His disquiet and his sense of dreamy disorientation had been swallowed, at least for the time being, by his rage. "And you know what? You can't even redeem Gold Bond Stamps anymore. The company went out of business. Everyone in Castle Rock was afraid of him--even I was a little afraid of him--and everyone thought he was as rich as Scrooge McFucking Duck, but he died broke."
"Maybe he didn't trust banks," Mr. Gaunt said. "Maybe he buried his treasure. Do you think that's possible, Ace?"
Ace opened his mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. Closed it.
"Stop that," said Mr. Gaunt. "You look like a fish in an aquarium."
Ace looked at the book in his hand. He put it on the counter and riffled through the pages, which were crammed tight with small print. And something breezed out. It was a large and ragged chunk of brown paper, unevenly folded, and he recognized it at once--it had been torn from a Hemphill's Market shopping bag. How often, as a little boy, had he watched his uncle tear off a piece of brown paper just like this one from one of the bags he kept under his ancient Tokeheim cash register? How many times had he watched him add up figures on such a scrap ... or write an IOU on it?
He unfolded it with shaking hands.
It was a map, that much was clear, but at first he could make nothing of it--it was just a bunch of lines and crosses and squiggly circles.
"What the fuck?"
"You need something to focus your concentration, that's all," Mr. Gaunt said. "This might help."
Ace looked up. Mr. Gaunt had put a small mirror in an ornate silver frame on the glass case beside his own cash register. Now he opened the other envelope he had taken from the locked drawer, and spilled a generous quantity of cocaine onto the mirror's surface. To Ace's not inexperienced eye, it looked to be of fabulously high quality; the spotlight over the display case kicked thousands of little sparkles from the clean flakes.